‘Just Doing Their Duty’

On Saturday, I set three alarms for 6 in the morning. But when I turned on the television, I was puzzled by the relative silence at Mission Control. Though landing time was approaching, there was little activity. The realization dawned as slowly for me, a veteran astronaut, as for everyone else. There was no immediate or decisive announcement, only a slow recognition that a catastrophe had occurred.

I didn’t know these astronauts. But I know what they were doing, because I’ve done it. Astronauts face danger all the time. It’s a job where danger is a basic assumption. But you don’t think of it that way. You can’t.

I became an astronaut because flying had always been part of my life. My father had flown in the 1920s and ‘30s; he was a major in the Army Air Corps. He was acquainted with Amelia Earhart and Orville Wright. My aunt was one of the first stewardesses, and my uncle was an air traffic manager at Eastern.

Flying at that time was exciting; it was a new kind of frontier. It wasn’t yet something all the other children thought of. There was no such thing as being an astronaut in those days, but I knew from a very young age that I wanted to go up in the air.

It was always dangerous. Being a pilot in Korea was dangerous and I did that. For a fighter pilot, the danger is that people are shooting at you. In space, the danger is different: It is the unknown, the inability to respond. In space, we always knew that we were risking our lives.

But if you’re going to do it, you can’t think of it that way. I’ve had my moments where things went wrong, and I’ve had to push aside fear.

In 1969, when Neil Armstrong and I made the first landing on the moon, descending toward the surface we experienced a series of computer alarms, and then we ran low on fuel. We didn’t panic because we had learned to manage those emotions and set them aside. We had been trained to understand that not everyone survives these situations. That’s just the nature of the business.

I don’t know that it makes us heroes. I don’t even know if the Columbia astronauts were heroes. They were doing something challenging, and they faced great danger. But it all happened so fast that they weren’t given the opportunity to respond. A hero is someone who is faced with a decision, and the decision that is made is ultimately what makes that person into a hero. But these men and women had no time to choose. They were just doing their duty. They weren’t offered a chance to respond. They died doing their duty.

What’s important now is that we not stop or slow down our space program.

We should take a step back and figure out what went wrong, and we should think about whether we chose the best possible path. But then we have to acknowledge that we did choose it, and that we owe it to our partners and investors and to the nation and to those who sacrificed their lives to continue it.

There were alternatives that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration might have chosen, and we might be in better shape if we had chosen differently. We underestimated the cost of the space shuttle. It is more complicated to maintain than we believed. The space station is far more difficult to assemble than we had originally thought. International cooperation is not an easy to thing to establish. And the cost of erecting the space station and the time it is taking to put it up are not what we anticipated; it is much more difficult.

One thing that this terrible tragedy has demonstrated is that we don’t have an adequate escape provision on the shuttle itself. I have been encouraging NASA to modify the shuttle.

This catastrophe might have been avoidable if there had been a discrete, survivable escape pod that could separate from the orbiter as it began to break up. Possibly, the astronauts would have been able to continue the reentry, with parachutes guiding them to a soft landing on land or ocean.

But that’s all hindsight. Now we have to look for the best alternatives going forward, so that when we look back 10 or 15 years from now, we can say that in 2003, as a result of the Columbia tragedy, we examined our alternatives closely and made the right decisions.

The United States started something in space, and the world expects us to continue. The future still holds great possibilities. We have to start thinking seriously about the notion of public space travel and commercial activity in space. Beginning with government research and exploration, we need to move toward private citizens in space. We must develop mature rockets and spacecraft as well as hotels and habitats in low orbit for public space travel. From that base we can venture beyond low Earth orbit to the moon, to asteroids and to Mars.

It’s absolutely critical that we continue our efforts.