I've learned a lot about hope in the past few years. I've learned that hope can come from unlikely places and can be the most powerful ally even as we are defeated again and again. But the moment after turning on the news early Saturday morning to find reports of a missing Columbia, my entire sense of hope seemed to vanish. Hours later I realized that my feelings of hopelessness were a dishonor to the seven astronauts aboard Columbia.
The tragedy was particularly close to home for me. In addition to being a student at UW-Madison, I am a co-op student at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. This means that I work at Goddard for part of the year and attend school for the rest of the year in preparation for a job there after I graduate. I spend my time at Goddard mostly writing press releases and NASA Fact Sheets about current missions, research, etc.
The NASA community is diverse--employees are of all different ages, races, nationalities and backgrounds. But it is rare to find a group of people so similar. Every NASA employee is characterized by the love of the unknown, the desire to discover our role in the universe and a delight in allowing an almost childlike curiosity to dictate. To be so dedicated to such a large undertaking requires this sort of passion.
I need to keep reminding myself that it is with this same passion that astronauts Rick Husband, Willie McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon went into space. These astronauts are heroes not because they died, but because even though they knew their lives could be at risk, they believed enough in the exploration of space to go anyway.
And they believed in the exploration of space because, in the end, it is the ultimate embodiment of human hope. Hope is the wish for something with expectation and comes from curiosity, from knowledge, from compassion and from beauty.
Curiosity leads astronauts into space with the wish to expand our base of knowledge pertaining to both the universe and life on our planet. The knowledge that scientists gain from space exploration leads to the hope that someday not only will we understand our role in the universe, but we will be able to solve earthly problems with new technologies or medicines.
The compassion demonstrated by the astronauts toward one another provides hope that we can find ways to settle our differences and see one another not as defined by where we are on Earth, but as related because we are from the same place in the universe. As for beauty, there may be nothing as beautiful as the realms of space. Space exploration grants us permission to hope that someday we can tap into that beauty and make it a part of humankind.
Yet regardless of these reasons to continue space exploration, in the days to come there will be much debate over the future of the space program. To stop sending humans would go against everything in which Columbia's astronauts believed and by which they lived. For my part, I'll continue to support NASA and honor the lives of Columbia's crew by keeping my eyes on the sky and my spirit full of hope.
Lindsay Renick Mayer is a junior majoring in journalism.
