Saturday morning brought the stark realization that space exploration is still dangerous, despite what seemingly outine"" space flights have lulled us to believe. Decades of operation punctuated sparingly by tragedy have brought us full circle once again.
Along with any endeavor that seeks to push the boundaries of human capability follows risks that only those who volunteer truly understand. There is nothing ""routine"" about taking a rocket from earth to sky, nothing simple and nothing guaranteed. Each one of the crew members on STS-107 understood these risks, and despite them still served.
For most of us, these dangers are beyond comprehension. What counterbalance could be so great as to tip the scale in favor of risking death? What reward could make leaving friends and family behind acceptable? To glimpse the scope of the operations they conducted is to glimpse the contributions they made to our future.
Experiments like those conducted aboard the shuttle and, in the future, on the International Space Station pave the way for progress. For these seven astronauts, the good they could do outweighed the risks. And though their worst fears were realized, it does not negate the good they did.
Although this mission ended in tragedy, the mission and crew represented what the space program, and America, is intended to represent.
The diversity of this crew--representing both genders, multiple ethnicities and a variety of backgrounds--was a realization of human potential. Astronauts are the pinnacles of their field, and to have that group populated with every variety of individual shows that even the highest summits of society are accessible to all.
In the weeks to come there will be questions about what went wrong and what the future of man is in space. But for now, it is a time to remember the seven brilliant individuals who perished.
On the most elemental level we can take from them an appreciation for the courage to accept risk in the pursuit of the greater good.
In the words of Laurel Clark, STS-107 crew member and UW-Madison graduate, ""there's a lot of different things that we do during life that could potentially harm us and I choose not to stop doing those things."" As we reflect on their lives and how they lived them, hopefully we can draw lessons for our own.
