The Astronut

The latest here.

There is not much to add, except that in this corner of Texas--the Interstate 45 corridor, running from Houston through Clearlake, past NASA Road 1 on down to Galveston and the Gulf--the news is being taken almost as a family tragedy, as if watching a favorite uncle being led away in handcuffs.

On either side of this fifty-mile stretch of freeway, where the best and the brightest of the space program walk among us, astronauts are revered more than soldiers, and soldiers are plenty revered.

Bad things that happen to the space program hit plenty of people around on a personal, a gut, level. A speech professor at my college worked for NASA for years, knew all the crew of the Challenger that exploded, including Christa McAuliffe. He was working at a classroom at the Space Station when it happened, leading a group of visiting students through a closed-circuit broadcast of the blast-off, when the shuttle exploded and, a minute later, a group of NASA personnel quietly led the children out of the classroom and on to the buses. It was this professor who told me what many people suspected: that the crew was killed not by the explosion but by the nine-mile fall to the water off the Cape; when the capsule hit the surface, the impact shattered the crews' spinal cords, killing them instantly.

This farce is nowhere near as tragic as that awful day. But, believe me, it has hit home.