Posted on 02/01/2003 11:35:37 AM PST by Dog Gone
ASHINGTON, Feb.1 — To sleeping Texans who heard the "boom-boom," it was the sound of the sky falling. To the clinical-voiced controller at NASA's Mission Control, it was a "contingency." To Americans already grappling with a confluence of threatening events, the instinctive reaction was, "What next?"
Like the space shuttle Challenger disaster 17 years ago this week and the attacks of Sept. 11, the breakup of the Columbia unfolded in real time before a nationwide television audience, sparking many of the same unsettled feelings. Only because the crash began some 40 miles above the earth could the instinct to think of terrorism be repressed.
But to a nation still struggling with the aftermath of the most devastating terrorist attack in its history and the abiding threat of another, plus a sluggish economy, nuclear tension with North Korea and the prospect of war with Iraq, this morning's tragedy fell as an especially harsh blow.
"We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun," Ronald Reagan told the nation on Jan. 28, 1986, when the Challenger exploded on takeoff. "I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the faint-hearted. It belongs to the brave."
President Bush will surely need to summon all the courage he can muster — and more important, summon the nation's — in the days and weeks ahead. For even as he tries to rally an anxious nation and doubting allies for a war, he will face a new, if predictable, challenge: public demands for answers and political demands for accountability.
The mourning will come first, of course. Like the Challenger, whose crew was a multiracial, multiethnic American mosaic, the Columbia had a diverse crew, including the first Israeli astronaut. One member was from Iowa and another was born in India.
Unlike the Challenger, which crashed at sea, the Columbia fell to earth this morning in fiery and potentially toxic bits over the cities in Mr. Bush's home state, like a scene from "War of the Worlds." NASA spokesmen warned the public not to touch any debris, but report it instead to law enforcement authorities.
In a twist of nomenclature that would seem implausible in fiction, a craft carrying Col. Ilan Ramon of the Israeli Air Force apparently broke up over an East Texas town called Palestine.
By late morning, NASA was lowering flags to half-staff and television screens that had been full of the lulling ritual of Saturday morning cartoons were alive with charts, drawings and the endlessly replayed footage of the shuttle's shockingly wrong multiple vapor trails as it streaked at six times the speed of sound toward a landing in Florida after a 16-day science mission.
John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth 41 years ago, and his wife, Annie, had just turned on their television set to watch the landing. "Once you went for several minutes without any contact, you knew something was terribly wrong," he told The Associated Press.
Government officials said there were no indications of possible terrorism, and the shuttle was out of range of surface-to-air missiles. Whatever the cause, there was no possibility of an emergency landing or ejection by the astronauts after the craft got in trouble at 200,000 feet, moving at 12,500 miles an hour.
In the initial aftermath of the Challenger disaster, the national and official mood was numbness. Only later did it become apparent that NASA had long had evidence of the very vulnerability that caused that accident, the O-rings on the shuttle's solid fuel rockets, which tended to become brittle and shrink in cold weather like that on the morning of Challenger's ill-fated launch. Engineers had warned of the possibility just hours before the launch.
So, too, in the days after Sept. 11, 2001, there was enormous national unity and great reluctance to question the government missteps or intelligence failures that might have left the nation vulnerable to such brutal attack. But those questions have since surfaced with increasing urgency, and many remain unanswered today.
But for the moment, today there was only shock. Democratic leaders of the House of Representatives, meeting at a Pennsylvania resort to plan strategy for confronting President Bush on taxes, Medicare and the rest of his domestic agenda, instead began to pray.
"We thought that matters we were dealing with were of the greatest seriousness," said the minority leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California. "But it isn't of the greatest urgency for us to discuss them right now."
Sad but true.
Already saw a post on DU where they connected Bush's hatred for Israel with the shuttle 'blowing up over Palestine, Texas'.
What the heck????
1) Where has there ever been an indication that Bush hates Israel?
2) Assuming he did hate Israel (ludicrous as that sounds) why and how would he have the shuttle blow up over a town named Palestine???
3) We have our own set of mentally challenged posters, but the folks at DU are down right professional about it!!!
Dee Dee has been doing punditry lately.
She is most definitely a clintonite.
The New York Times has descended to new levels of tackiness.
And in also pointing out the Israeli spaceman/Palestine, TX connection on at least one other thread, so have other FReepers. That said, my prayers go out to the familes. God Bless America and Israel.
foreverfree
I can think of less than a handful of events in my life where your stomach just has that empty/knotty feeling that I have right now. As Americans, we are challenged to rise above adversity now more than ever, on many fronts. I pray to God that as a nation we are truly up to that challenge. I have no doubt that many are, but, sadly, I also have no doubt many are out to see us fail. Manned space flight in the US is about be assaulted by the latter, and unfortunately, manned space flight is as much or more political than tech/science. I think for NASA and manned flight to survive this, the silent majority who support these programs will have to make their voices heard loud and clear on capitol hill over the next several years, or they will be drowned out by those who would rather divert the resources to more short sighted, self interests.
This article exemplifies exactly the assault that is coming. Will the silent majority stand up, and remain standing for the long haul?
To whom? It's quite evident none of them are acquainted with the God of the universe. Otherwise, they wouldn't spit in His face on a daily basis.
They support killing babies. God is NOT going to hear any prayer except one of repentance.
Yep, absolutely no redeeming value. Just more Hal Raines psycho-babble meant to fill those empty skulls belonging to members of RAT cult.
The news reports state that a large amount of debris has landed at Nacogdoches, Texas which is the city marked with a star in this East Texas map.
Columbia was flying at 12,500 miles per hour or 208 miles per minute. Screenshots of the breakup taken in Dallas by an amateur video camera have been posted on the CNN web site.
From the map, it can be seen that The New York Slime could have stated that Columbia broke up over Dallas, De Soto, Gun Barrel City, Athens, Corsicana or any number of the dozens of towns and cities in the East Texas area.
Instead, The New York Slime threw out red meat to the Islamofascists all over the Globe by picking out the one town in this area of the Bible Belt that was named after the Holy Land to designate as the one town in all of East Texas over which Columbia broke up.
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