25 years after Challenger

I'm a day late, but I still didn't want the quarter century anniversary of the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger and her crew to slip into history unnoticed.

I just finished watching the Progress 41 cargo ship dock to the Pirs compartment on the International Space Station. Twenty-five years and a day after Challenger tumbled into the Atlantic, the fantastically complex and near-miraculous business of space continued uninterrupted some 220 miles above our heads. And I got to watch it from my netbook as I wandered around the house excitedly showing the Internet-streamed spectacle anyone I could find.

I'm nowhere near convinced we've learned our lessons from that terrible morning a generation ago - among them, communicate with each other, and appreciate that any technology is subject to the same weaknesses inherent in those who created it - because since then we've lost another orbiter and witnessed the slow dismantling of America's space program.

President Obama may have been trying to evoke JFK when he dropped the "Sputnik moment" line during last week's State of the Union address, but the sad reality is western society no longer believes space exploration deserves priority treatment or funding. The myopia which had clouded U.S. space policy decisions since the end of the Apollo era is showing no signs of clearing up. If anything, it's worsening. Which makes me wonder what the astronauts who died trying to build a space-based future would have thought.

Your turn: Does space exploration have a future? Should it? Why/why not?

One more thing: I'm a bit of a space-head, and have written about this subject both on this blog and in print in years past. Here's what I wrote five years ago, and here's a column I wrote in the wake of the second shuttle accident.