NASA Reflects on Past, Looks to Future

As you are reading this, innumerable satellites are orbiting the Earth, the rovers on Mars are still roving, and an international team of scientists is living in a tin can in the sky.

While placing things into space has become almost commonplace, it has never been routine. Sometimes things go wrong, and millions of dollars are lost. Other times, things turn tragic and human lives are lost.

NASA is commemorating three such tragedies, which have all eerily occurred around the end of the month of January.

On Jan. 27, 1967, three of the first group of NASA astronauts - Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee - died during a routine ground test of the Apollo capsule, later named Apollo 1.

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The highly anticipated Jan. 28, 1986, launch of Space Shuttle Challenger, which carried the first teacher-astronaut, Christa McAuliffe, was watched live by many around the nation, including school children. But 73 seconds after takeoff, the shuttle erupted in a fireball that killed the entire crew.

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On Feb. 1, 2003, following a 16-day science mission, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart upon re-entry, killing the entire crew: U.S. astronauts Rick Husband, Willie McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark and Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon.
While it is important to reflect upon the painful memories of mistakes past, it is equally important to continue moving forward despite the inherent risks of manned space flight.

"The spirit of exploration is truly what it is to be human," astronaut Stephen Robinson said in an August 2005 audio message on flight STS-114, which directly followed the Columbia disaster.

"[W]e hope if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program," Grissom said just a few weeks before he died, the NASA History Web site said. "The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."
Space shuttle Atlantis is on schedule for a February 7th launch that will deliver the European Space Agency's Columbus laboratory to the International Space Station, and sometime in the late fall of this year, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbier (LRO) will be sent to gather information in preparation for man's return to the moon.

Here's hoping for nothing but smooth sailing in all future missions.

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