Our outstretched hand was slapped down on January 28th by a merciless fate. To be sure, there are those who will take the shuttle explosion as an omen to scurry back to our caves lest a vengeful nature seek us out and inflict more ill upon a presumptuous mankind. The weak of heart and the short of sight will admonish us to take our swollen, stinging hand and relish the pain as a lesson not to think so highly of ourselves that we would yearn for the universe.
They are wrong, of course, just as they have been wrong for all of history. It is not to the faint of heart that nature reveals herself. It is to the daring and the bold. Without this drive for knowledge, man is no more than a great ape.
The lesson of the catastrophe is not just that exploration is a risky business. It is part of an even greater truth: Life itself is dangerous. Those who condemn the proponents of space exploration will no doubt continue to drive automobiles, fly in airplanes, and purchase electrical appliances for their homes. There is no safe technology, there is only the acceptance of minor risks — that can prove to be killers — to be balanced against benefits to our physical, intellectual, and moral well-being.
For a moment, Challenger was our outstretched hand toward the cosmos, and then it was slapped down. But, if sometime in the future the manifests of Discovery, Columbia, or Atlantis find themselves short by about seventy kilograms of warm protein, I would be happy to oblige.
update 181115: once again correspondent TM exercises his editorial prerogative and “corrects” my work. For some reason (human error? conflation? caprice?), upon publication, the word “manifests” was replaced with “destinies” and the elegant and poetic expression “short of sight” was truncated to the blunter and cruder “short-sighted.”
Upon additional reflection, it occurs to me that The Daring and the Bold would be a great title for an anthology comic book series, except that DC beat me to it long ago with The Brave and the Bold. Besides, Lethargy Lad already has his hands full with Daring Love and Daring Features.