Posted on 02/05/2003 4:08:13 PM PST by knighthawk
HOUSTON - Ron Dittemore simply cannot help himself.
The shuttle program manager is clearly beside himself with grief, and yet he is also so keenly absorbed by discovering its genesis that from time to time, wonder will creep into his voice and raise it a notch.
"It's not the absolute value of attitude change that is interesting," he said at one point yesterday, describing the pitch of the space shuttle Columbia's doomed flight last weekend. "What's becoming interesting to us now is the rate of change." At another moment, he said, of temperature increases captured at the mid-section of the shuttle shortly before it disintegrated, "It doesn't represent a structural problem, but it's interesting to us." At another, he was confessing, "There is an interest in the wheel well."
Mr. Dittemore, who has spent virtually his entire career at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is the fellow now irrevocably linked to the loss of the shuttle and its seven-member crew: As the boss, he is where the buck stops, and as the man delivering the daily press briefings here, which he makes sound like university lectures, the Columbia's most public surviving figure.
He is also the perfect face for the sprawling community of astronauts who live and work here in the Clear Lake area south of Houston and for those who love them -- a dear and beautiful geek in a veritable sea of them, an engineer by training who like those enormously accomplished colleagues of his who go boldly into space, is most timorous when confronted by his own raw emotions.
"I haven't talked to a lot of people and asked, how do they feel?" he said yesterday when asked if it was good to be back at work.
"But from personal experience, I can tell you, as long as I'm at work, as long as I'm focused on the job I have to do, so long as I'm reviewing data, I can stay pretty well focused. The hardest thing was the drive home in my car, Saturday afternoon, when I was alone with my own thoughts. I've talked to several others who have had the same experience.
"So long as we are together, trying to solve the problem, we can stay focused. But when we're alone, and on our way home, many have commented that that's the worst environment, that that has been our most difficult moment. So I would think that many, to come back today, will find it therapeutic to rub shoulders, to talk about it, to work through the difficulties."
And when Mr. Dittemore gets home, and sits "and think about the events and am left with my own thoughts," what does he do? "I get on the computer at home and read some of these e-mails" he's been getting from friends and fellow NASA believers.
"You can only imagine how it felt when someone comes up to tell you you've lost a vehicle and a crew," he said a little later, near tears. "For us that sit there and work with these individuals ... it's not something I want you to go through."
Mr. Dittemore wagged a long finger then.
"We will recover from this.
"Just as the phoenix rose from the ashes, we're gonna do the same. We're gonna find the problem, fix it, and get back to human space flight. We'll be the better for this terrible tragedy."
Today, they will all pause at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center for a private memorial service, open only to NASA employees and dignitaries ranging from U.S. President George W. Bush and Laura Bush to Brad Emel, the local restaurateur who is also the Mayor of El Lago, the tiny city that, at any given time since the space program began, about 10% of the astronauts in training call home and that has a space shuttle in its logo.
The city, population 3,075 and with only 1,000 houses, is one of a series off NASA Road 1, a commercial strip that is in parts lined down the middle with palm trees, which appear, at first blush, to blend seamlessly one into the other, much as do Florida's seacoast towns and where community spirit would appear to be an oxymoronic improbability. But not so.
El Lago, in particular, is awash in astronauts, its tiny City Hall decorated with pictures and cherished momentoes from the 53 who lived in the city while at the Space Center, among them the first, and second, men to walk on the moon -- Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Mr. Emel has one of the current trainees as a neighbour; he sold his old house to another; he used to ride his bicycle with Patty Hilliard, an astronaut who died almost two years ago in a private-plane accident, and with Kalpana Chawla, the 41-year-old Indian-born flight engineer aboard Columbia. He was so distraught last Saturday, he said, that it took a while to realize that Ms. Chawla, whom he called, as everyone did, "K.C.", was one of the seven who were lost.
K.C. didn't live in El Lago proper, but in the adjacent village of Taylor Lake, which shares its police department with El Lago, and Mr. Emel said he thought, at last night's regular council meeting, he would probably "do something to get her picture up with Patty's." A more serious memorial will wait until the time is right.
"I still can't believe that both those girls are gone, in less than two years," he said yesterday. "You know, the astronauts are pretty impressive, highly intellectual overachievers." He remembers one day in particular, when he, Patty and K.C. and a couple of friends rode all day. "I didn't ride again for a long time after," he said. "Those girls were in tremendous shape."
Scott Robertson was married to Patty, and though he marvels still at all that she was able to do in her 38 years -- she was a medical doctor with a family practice she gave up, a pilot with her commercial licence and was in training as a flight surgeon when she was seconded into the astronaut program -- and at all of those for whom "perfect isn't good enough and who are the best of the best," he said the days of the astronauts being treated as local gods is long gone.
"It's not like it was in the days of the Apollo or Gemini or Mercury programs," he said last night.
"In those days, the local Chevrolet dealership supplied all the astronauts with Corvettes, so it was pretty easy to tell who was who: They were the ones with the crew cuts and the convertible Corvettes." But his wife, he said, was great friends with a neighbour who never even knew she was in the space program.
"They're the best of the best on the one hand," he said, "but on the other, they're just normal people with really cool jobs, you know?" Their life together was ordinary and lovely -- weekends at the airport, flying small planes; friends; their two dogs.
As a good friend of K.C. and mission specialists Laurel Clark and David Brown, Mr. Robertson, who is a pilot for Continental Express, has been invited to today's service. He expects the families will have "a tougher time closing the book" than he did, because they saw it happen on TV and because they may never recover remains.
He has wondered about the number of astronauts who are deeply religious, and come to the conclusion, "Surely, when you have to be right by your Maker, whoever he is, or after you have experienced that, you have a completely different perspective.'"
Ordinary people from all the nearby towns are still streaming, in the hundreds, across busy NASA No. 1 to the memorial that now threatens to overwhelm the big concrete sign at the entrance to the Space Center. It is a typically American shrine -- now so de rigueur at the sites of such tragedies that "makeshift" is hardly the suitable adjective.
It is overrun by balloons, flowers, teddy bears and stuffed animals, handmade signs and awkward if heartfelt poems ("Is it fair for them to give their lives for we?" one begins).
But there is also a sign that bears, in the original Latin, a line from Seneca: "There is no easy way to the stars." It isn't easy even for the new stars, the nerds at their computers, the engineers with their numbers, and the crazed achievers afraid of nothing but failure.
Christie Blatchford can be contacted at cblatchford@nationalpost.com
I've found him to be straightforward, logical, analytical, and very refreshing.
Good man, in my opinion.
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