1:02 PM
I was asked today why I care so much about the disaster, why I'm spending so much time blogging about it. So it seemed like the right time to finish and post an essay I started over the weekend:

The Dream is Alive

I was in first grade when I decided to become an astronaut. When I was small, one of my favorite books was A Trip to the Moon, but I spent my young-childhood and kindergarten digging in the backyard and convinced I was going to be an archaeologist. I suspect it was probably the flood of news surrounding the space shuttle's first launch in 1981 that turned my head from the earth to the stars. On April 12, 1981, the second and third graders were allowed to stay inside at reccess to watch the launch of the space shuttle. But I was so upset about being unable to watch that finally a teacher took pity and allowed a first grader to come inside just a minute before liftoff. Still in my jacket, I remember standing in the doorway behind a crowded classroom of elementary students counting down from ten to one--and then a cheer as the Columbia climbed to space on a tower of flame.

I thought about other careers over the years, bouncing from job to job as all kids do. For a while I considered designing cars, and I always thought drawing comics would be a lot of fun. I even wondered about combining the two to build cars for superheroes. I was young.

But through it all I still dreamed of space. My copy of the Space Shuttle Operator's Manual grew dog-earred as I read and reread launch sequences and looked up the acronyms I'd see in news stories: STS, ET, SRB, PDRS, TDRS, LDEF. My parents took me to the Science Museum of Minnesota to see "Hail Columbia" and "The Dream is Alive", IMAX movies that still make my heart sing with joy.

On the morning of January 28, 1986, I was coming out of physical education and headed to my next class when someone (I still remember who, even if they probably don't) walked by and said, "Nice fireworks!" When I didn't understand, he was happy to explain and drive the knife home--the Challenger had exploded shortly after liftoff. I thought he was joking, but the secretary in the school office confirmed his story. I don't think I ever skipped a class before or after, but I didn't even care about classes as I sat in the study hall and watched the television coverage that afternoon. Over the next few days, I obsessively read the papers and watched the news. Somewhere in my boxes I still have a file of clipped stories and a videotape of material taped off television during that period--proto-blogging, I suppose.

The next summer I got my first job, detasseling corn. I read the Space Shuttle Operator's Manual as we rode the bus between fields, other kids laughing and saying that the shuttle would never fly again. Still I dreamed. The year before, the movie "Space Camp" had hit the theaters. Stunned that such a place existed, I had sought out the backbreaking work of detasseling so I could get some extra money and save up--I wanted to go to Space Camp. With a lot of saving, and help from my parents, by the end of the year I was making reservations.

I traveled to Huntsville in the spring of 1988 for one of the greatest weeks of my life. I rode the multi-axis trainer. I wore a spacesuit and trained in the zero-buoyancy tank. I read the jargon-filled manual, attended astronomy and physics lectures, and took tests. I went to sleep at night looking out the window at the Academy's rocket park. At the end of the week, I qualified to be the pilot for our simulated mission. Our team won the week's award for the most successful mission, handling a string of simulated emergencies triggered by instructors that even included a fire in the cargo bay during the landing sequence.

Each team at the Academy was named after a defense contractor, and the one we had been given at the beginning of the week was "Teledyne-Brown". But as our group became more close-knit during the week and discussed our love of spaceflight and space travel, we decided on a new symbol. Going down to the gift shop one afternoon after lunch, we all bought mission patches from 51-L--the Challenger mission. Through the rest of the week, we carried them around as a symbol of determination that our generation wouldn't let the dream of spaceflight die.

It was about halfway through high school when I realized that on physical qualifications alone, I wasn't going to be able to follow the military career track of most shuttle pilots and commanders. But that was okay--I loved math and science, and could always be a mission specialist. When I went to college, I continued to study math and physics, with a particular interest in astrophysics and astronomy. Suddenly, about midway through college, things changed. I discovered that I wanted to pursue my love of writing as a career...and that meant setting aside my dream of going into space.

In his book Chasing Science, Frederik Pohl talks of 'spectator science', of participating in science simply by observing and enjoying the wonders of research, developement and exploration. That's what I've done ever since, following news of shuttle missions, the space station, and space exploration with what has been called on occasional an "unreasonable excitement".

Then came last Saturday morning. In the heat of blogging the incoming news, I flashed back at moments to that seven-year old watching Columbia liftoff for the first time, and to the teenager hearing the news of the Challenger explosion. But mostly I remembered warm days in Alabama, walking though the rocket park with the Challenger patch in my pocket, determined to keep the dream alive.

Last night I pulled my copy of the Space Shuttle Operator's Manual off the shelf and thumbed through it while watching my DVD of "The Dream is Alive". Afterwards, I pulled out my copies of Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience and John Lewis' terrific Mining the Sky and prepared to read them again.

I'm heartened by what I'm hearing from the media, the astronauts' families, NASA administrators, and even the President. The space program will go on. But there are still those who aren't convinced that human destiny lies not in fighting over an ever more crowded Earth but in the freedom that will come when we reach out to the stars--and are determined to stay there. Until they're convinced, until anyone with determination and a dream can journey toward that frontier, there's still work to be done.

It's not work that can only be done by scientists and politicians--simply by kindling the dream in your heart and the hearts of others, you can play an important part. Order a patch. Join the National Space Society. Watch the excitement of the race for the X-Prize. Find what starts the countdown inside yourself and others.

Keep the dream alive.