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Editor: Ernest Lilley
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Columbia's Crew: Commander Rick D. Husband Pilot William C. McCool Payload Specialist Michael P. Anderson Mission Specialist Kalpana Chawla Mission Specialist David M. Brown Mission Specialist Laurel B. Clark Payload Specialist. Ilan Ramon, Israel

 Future
by: Ernest Lilley
Date: 02/03/03
Official Website: NASA Columbia Home Page

Summary: While we grieve for the loss of Columbia's crew, TechRevu editor wonder's what's ahead for the space age. Will we a generation that grew up in the Space Age leave a legacy that others can build on, or an abandoned dream?

Article: Columbia and the Future
by: Ernest Lilley

I am on the way to the gym at 9am Saturday, February 1st, 2003. The man on the radio said that Columbia is on its way back to earth, and I think, great...I can watch it land.

When Mission Control announces that they have lost contact with the shuttle and we see broken pieces of the shuttle falling across the blue Texas sky I know I've added another flashbulb moment to my life.

I wish I could remember the good moments so clearly as Kennedy's assassination, Apollo 1's fire, or Challenger's fall from the sky.

I wish I could remember the names of the astronauts we've lost, American, Russian, and now Israeli. Since most of the astronauts lost in the exploration of space have been American, a nation made up wholly of immigrants, the whole world has been included.

The whole world mourns.

But this time there is a new feeling of dread mixed with the sadness, none survived the mach 18 destruction of Columbia 40 miles above the earth, and yet there is one more victim lying in critical condition while we hover around watching monitors and wondering.

The Space Age is dying.

I grew up with the Space Age. In elementary school I wrote reports about the Mercury astronauts and satellites. I watched Neil Armstrong step out onto the moon and muff his first line. I waited while Apollo 13 limped home, the original...not the one with Tom Hanks. And I brought a TV into work so we could all watch the launch of Challenger that fateful morning in January.

It's like watching an old friend who's had another heart attack. How many more can it take?

That's up to us. Is space a legacy we want to leave the generations that come after, or a dream of youth we can abandon as we grow older? What will we leave behind us? A few wars and a burned out economy? A few milestones, left as markers for what could have been, but without any path to the peaks beyond?

President Bush said precious little about new frontiers in his state of the union address, but it's new frontiers that make an economy grow. Returning to space is just the sort of thing that our world needs to kick start it again, for all the old reasons, from the gifts that new technology brings, to the understanding of how ecosystems work, to the ability to stand back form this marvelous blue marble floating in the void and to see that it's one world, fragile and shared.

The shuttle was never designed to fly forever. The tiles were the weakest link from the start. Yet, it has served us well as a stepping stone to space, and we will no doubt continue using it until the remaining three are worn out or overtaken by disaster. Nothing lives forever.

We knew there would be a cost in human life in our expansion into space. That's not the tragedy. The tragedy will be if we choose to waste those lives rather than to make them an investment in what comes next.

For my money, and as a taxpayer, it is my money, I'd like to see some serious effort made to develop new shuttles...and not overpriced boondoggles like the now abandoned X-33. For a start I'd put my money into something simple and affordable, like the Delta Clipper SSTO that NASA abandoned.

I'll be asking some friends in the space community for their thoughts on what our future is and reporting back here on what they say. My thought is that we need to build more and better ways to get to low earth orbit, our doorstep to space. Let others go to Mars and beyond...but let us be the ones whose shoulders they stand on to do it.

It's time for those of us who grew up with in the space age to dig into the money that we made on the technologies that came out of it (You do realize that the personal computer is the direct result of miniaturized electronics for spaceflight...right?) and put it into something that we can leave those that come after.

Ernest Lilley
Editor - TechRevu
02/03/03f