Beyond Columbia: Is There a Future for Humanity in Space‪?‬

On the first day of February 2003, the space shuttle Columbia started its return to Earth at the end of a sixteen-day mission. While the mission had apparently performed "without a hitch," the shuttle suffered a series of failures in the last minutes of reentry, followed by a cutoff of communications with Mission Control around 10:00 AM (CST). Forty miles above Texas, the shuttle exploded and killed its crew of seven astronauts almost seventeen years to the day after the Challenger disaster, an incident high in the minds of those looking on. In the wake of the Columbia crash, observers asked whether human space flight was worth the risk. While this wasn't a surprising opinion in light of the tragedy, the weakness of the voices replying in the affirmative did. It wasn't only the experience of watching the tragedy unfold on television that left those voices so weak. The truth was that in the eyes of pundits and the public alike, human space travel had become a luxury, a stunt, a boondoggle rather than a legitimate field of endeavor, let alone the door to the future.