Saturday, February 1, 2003

Spacing out

Columbia was the first (and for now the last) shuttle launched into space.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on Columbia. (Woops, Discovery. Columbia carried the Chandra X-Ray observatory. Here's a photo of Sagittarius A, the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way's center.)

The remaining shuttles are Endeavor, Discovery and Atlantis.

NASA considered mothballing Columbia in 2001.

NASA's servers are being hit pretty hard right now, clearly.

My guess is that the current International Space Station crew will return on a Soyuz flight and there will be no further launches for at least two years. (Here's the current schedule, which is now on hold.)

This will delay all kinds of stuff that depends on shuttle flights, though the ISS will be hardest hit. Space tech in general will be slowed down.

I'm taking the kid to the beach. For more, check with Dave. He's all over this thing.

The second lesson

I was going to get up and watch the Shuttle re-enter the atmosphere this morning, but forgot to set the alarm.

Instead, a few minutes ago, I got a call from my sister, whose voice sounded just like it did when she called before dawn on September 11, 2001.

Now I'm sitting here with a six year old boy who loves aviation and space travel, talking about what happened to Columbia, and how something so adventurous and wonderful could end so badly.

It's been almost exactly seventeen years since the last Shuttle disaster. Not long afterwards I wrote Accidental Lessons: Reflections on the Challenger Tragedy.

I'm sure we'll learn from this one too.