Jackson Free Press

In the two days before the shuttle Columbia disintegrated and traced that awful sparkling arc across the Texas sky, I'd already been thinking about space. On Thursday, I'd read a Harper's article about the unthinkable catastrophe a relatively small asteroid hitting the Earth would cause. On Friday, I'd finished a National Geographic piece about the incomprehensible mystery of countless galaxies speeding throughout an expanding universe. The asteroid essay warned of the unavoidability of humankind's eventual extinction. The galaxy story spoke of humankind's daily discovery of additional star systems out at the edges of infinity. And then …

Saturday morning, the first of February, I'm in my study listening to NPR when I first hear the terse announcement that the space shuttle Columbia had lost contact with NASA while on landing glide across the U.S. toward Cape Canaveral. "Lost contact": the only information available at first. Enough for me, though, to expect that a catastrophe had happened. And of course now we know the worst happened to seven human beings racing 12,500 miles per hour at 200,000 feet above Earth's surface.

After listening to the early radio reports, I braced myself and turned on the television. I muted the volume and watched that contrail of fire cutting across the cloudless Texas sky, captured in multiple perspectives by the lenses of camcorder after camcorder. Over and over I stared at the videoed track, a beautiful sight to anyone ignorant of its ramifications, rendered horrible by confirmation that all seven on board had perished.

Sitting there staring at that plume, I thought back to the week following Sept. 11, remembered how there were no contrails crossing the skies during the FAA-mandated shutdown of air travel. For almost four full days, for the first time since at least the 1920s, no commercial or private air traffic whatsoever moved in U.S. airspace.

On the last night of that shutdown, a beautiful calm Friday evening here in Jackson, I had stepped out into my backyard, peered up into the clear and quiet sky. I'd contemplated that, throughout that shutdown, there was zero risk of any civilian dying aboard an airplane in the U.S. Perhaps in that way the absence of contrails made us "safer."

Such "safety" won't ensure happiness. Won't inspire. Won't fulfill dreams. In the end, won't even comfort.

So when the commercial flights started again on Saturday, Sept.15, most all air travelers began to swallow their fears, accept the risks—both old and new—and board those planes again. And began to come alive again.

Often we in this country obsess over our safety. We become fretful, and sometimes paralyzed, when there is risk, whether real or perceived. In recent months, the constant threats of terrorism and the imminence of war has exacerbated these tendencies.

Throughout history, the human desire for safety has not seriously encumbered the range and scope of human exploration of the unknown. Always there was someone daring and smart enough to sail the unknown ocean or cross the unseen continent. Usually there was someone optimistic and rich enough to fund the trip.

Now, the ubiquitous mass media allows all of us to watch, in real time and from an up-close vantage point, just how terrifying the risks of exploration can be. Now, with cameras everywhere, we all endure the kinds of sights visited upon only the bravest in previous generations. And since we, as taxpayers, hold the purse strings for today's expeditions, the disasters that terrify us may well threaten the financial underpinnings of the whole enterprise.

In the end, the Columbia disaster will not, and should not, end space exploration. For a time, this great loss should remind us how those who strive for the most spectacular advances in human history always endure great risks, and sometimes succumb to them. It should teach us that those who pursue the worthiest goals will never be safe, and that sobering as that realization may be, it is no justification for timidity.

In a world always full of dangerous conflicts, space may give hope to those engaged in the riskiest human endeavors: those who seek sustainable peace among peoples in conflict. For high above the earth tonight, aboard the international space station, live two Americans and one Russian, representatives of the two world powers that for four decades threatened to wipe each other off the map. Because of Columbia's demise and the resulting grounding of the rest of the shuttle fleet, those three are stranded there, temporarily at least, together. Cooperative efforts, between two countries once at each other's throats, got them up there—cooperative efforts between those same two countries are underway to bring them home.

Space exploration, as dangerous and expensive it may be, is safer and cheaper than war.

Perhaps that heretofore unseen asteroid will arrive one day and bring that catastrophic end to all humanity's bickering and threats. Here is our greater risk: the seven billion or so of us, hurtling together through the expanding universe on this space station dubbed Earth, crammed with the fiendish instruments of our own self-destruction, suffused with the self-righteousness and folly to employ them.

Of late I've had days where I conclude that, given human nature, peace is impossible to achieve. Then this morning, next to the cash register at my dry cleaners, I encounter this bit of folk wisdom on the day-by-day flip calendar: "Humans do not fail; they simply quit trying."

Our human predicament requires—indeed demands—a commitment, among peoples who seem intractably divided, to cooperative efforts and shared goals. Commitment to seek an understanding that seems unimaginable—until creative thinkers dare to imagine it. Commitment to reach for a peace that seems unattainable—until brave souls embark, at great risk, to attain it.

Mark Wiggs is an attorney and writer who lives in Belhaven.