The Challenger disaster Jan. 29, 1986
Media is calling it the greatest disaster since the Hindenburg,
if not in total loss of life, then in money, a billion-dollar machine gone up
in smoke, exploding on the edge of space, taking seven lives as well as the
dreams of a country.
The loss may be even greater than they are telling us, space
itself.
Mary, my uncle’s wife’s sister – a high level muckity-muck
from high level muckity -muck university, had a project on the shuttle, and has
been on the phone with high level muckity- mucks all day about it.
She knew what few others knew that the crew did not perish in
the explosion but screamed the whole way down until their craft impacted with
the earth.
The whole affair has left me shaken. This last year has been
one filled with disasters, national and personal, including the fire in Passaic
that nearly left me homeless.
The cumulative effect has left me pessimistic about the
future, though this last one hit me in the gut because I watched the deaths
occur on national television, knowing the horror behind the headlines, even
when most of the human race did not.
But as with all things, this seeps into me like bad blood,
as I struggle to pull my life together, unable at this moment to distract myself
with high hopes, when I can barely make rent – after growing up with visions of
space and the high hopes that someday I might even stand on the surface of
another planet, only to find those hopes crashing to earth with the screams of
seven people.
Unlike Roland and those at The Morgue, I always kept alive
the concept of progress, after having spent a childhood reading thousands of
Sci-fi novels (many of them stolen from Meyer Brothers Department store,
envisioning myself in the space ship as it breaks through the atmosphere into
space. Now, I can’t get it out of my head the vision of crashing back the way
these seven did.
Even before the wreckage cools, we get talk of people who
want to kill off the space program, political people on both sides of the aisle
finding other uses for the massive amount of money needed to propel people into
space – the cheapskate GOP who wants to lower taxes for the rich, the more
pathetic social activists who want to squander that money the way they squander
all money into pointless and ineffective programs for the poor.
Each side wants to spit on the grave of these seven by using
this tragedy as an excuse to push their political agenda, losing the whole
vision JFK had, and condemning humanity to spend its existence on the surface
of this planet when I think we are destined to wander the stars.
Pauly, the perpetual doomsayer, is upset about the disaster,
too, since he honestly believes in all that chicken little chicken shit he
spouts about the environment, claiming that humanity is slowly turning our
planet into poison that will eventually make us extinct.
But he’s inconsistent. He started out claiming we are facing
a new ice age but has recently jumped onto the global warming band wagon,
telling me if we don’t get our asses off the earth, the human race is doomed.
This differs slightly from the other doomsayers who rant and rave about how we
ought to stop driving our cars and using hair spray and are out at the local beach
with tape measures to measure how fast the sea is rising rather than just
laying on the sand and getting a tan.
If they have their way, we might kill off our last chance at
space flight in our life time.
The news has made martyrs of the seven Challenger
astronauts, and rightly so, one bright spot in the other wise dismal situation.
We have had too few heroes over the last few years, even if these seven are
only a handful of many others who had stepped up to take addition big steps for
humanity.
The social justice people ought to be grateful for space
flight allowing us to have new frontiers to conquer after all the bullshit they
spout about how our previous conquests murdered so many indigenous people – hogwash
history that has turned Columbus into a villain when he might well have stood shoulder
to shoulder with the people on the Challenger.
Pauly, fortunately, has avoided that sin, and doesn’t tear
down former heroes in order to elevate new ones, and does not subscribe to the
terrorists the social justice people would put up on Mount Rushmore in place of
the great men who are already there.
The sad part of all this talk is that most people do not yet
realize just how big an impact this disaster has for the future, even if the
political hacks are prevented from shutting down our hopes for space.
I’m still pissed about the fact we stopped going to the moon
and have done nothing when we did go. Now, I suspect we may see the end of even
this limited venture into space, and we may spend our lives looking up at the
stars rather than looking down from them.
The ghouls we have as journalists go on and on, bleeding
every bit of horror from this tragedy, making the whole disaster seem that much
worse. I keep expecting them to report on road kill next and to pan the cameras
over the bodies along our roadsides from every possible angle, until we all puke.
Fortunately, I heard about the disaster on the radio, while
making the trip south to Toms River where my uncle and mother live, and so did
not get to see the images until I arrived, hearing the journalists in their
desperate attempt to describe the disaster the way journalists long ago tried
to described the Hindenburg, failing completely, lacking the talent for such
speech that old radio journalists had back then.
It was a shock only because I had gone to sleep with them
ranting and raving about the war ships racing towards the shores of Libya, and
so hearing their moaning and groaning in the morning, I naturally thought we
were at war.
Then, when I finally got to a TV set, these vulture journalists
kept showing the happy faces of the astronauts as they made their way to the launching
pad, interchanged with the strange large image of white smoke left after the
explosion sent them to their deaths, after 75 seconds into their flight, their spacecraft
plunging to earth, but lost in the smoke and debris so that most people were
unaware that they lived their last moments in utter horror.
Religious people say we ought to pray for their souls; I saw
we should pray for our own.
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