Article February 24, 2003 Issue

Columbia: What is not gone

By Channing Walker

The Christian Science Monitor

"It's gone," said a senior US official in one of the first formal statements to the news media about the Columbia space shuttle, which broke up over Texas just 16 minutes before its scheduled touchdown on Saturday morning at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. All crew members were lost.

The photos of the seven astronauts—five men and two women, one of the men an Israeli, only three of the crew with prior experience in space—suddenly seem like photos of family. Warm and smiling faces of a crew taken just prior to launching, a crew setting out to push back the limits of our knowledge and open new paths of scientific understanding. And now they are gone.

Most of us had scarcely heard of them, never seen them until they were smiling back at us from every TV screen, every computer monitor, every front page of a newspaper. Somehow, though, that doesn't diminish the longing to draw, if possible, something positive from the embers of tragedy. To glimpse, if it can be glimpsed, that all the good of these individuals and of the entire space shuttle endeavor, is not gone. That some shred of goodness is lasting, immortal, beyond the reach of tragedy.

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