"JFK" 1986

I hadn't yet been born - hell, I hadn't even been conceived, yet - when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. But from the time I was aware of history until the 20th anniversary of that terrible day (apparently the appropriate period of mourning?), I was reminded every November 22 of the day our nation cried. Invariably the question was asked, "What were you doing the day Kennedy was killed?" And, invariably, those i knew who were around and self-aware on that day could remember exactly what it was they were doing when they heard the news.

I was stationed at Wüschheim Air Station in West Germany. I had been in country for exactly one month. As one of the newest airmen on base, and still fairly low in rank, I was put on the midnight shift guarding the GLCM Alert Maintenance Area (an acronym within an acronym!). Working midnights and living in the dorms could prove a challenge with all of the young, single men from all shifts trying to get everything out of life they could while far away from home, so sleep during the day was often elusive and regularly interrupted.

I felt the side of my bed - the top bunk - being tugged. A voice kept saying, "Dude, dude." Finally aware of reality, I rolled violently over to confront my roommate for waking me before the time I had set my alarm to do it.

"Dude, the space shuttle just blew up." He was a joker, and rarely sounded down. But he certainly seemed in shock.

I pictured dozens of scenarios in the blink of my eyes. In orbit. On the launch pad. On the landing strip. Shuttle launches were still new enough that the media paid rapt attention to them; that I paid interested attention in them. I knew one was scheduled to go up, but in my foggy state I couldn't be sure if it had already launched or was still waiting.

"WHAT?!" I sat up. "No way!"

"Yeah," he said.

"What happened?"

"Just fucking blew up," he said as he walked away from my bunk.

I maneuvered to climb down from the bed. "Where? When?"

"Right in the middle of the launch."

Launch pad. I pictured the old, early 1960s era test launches of space rockets, one in particular that lifted a few dozen feet off the ground and then dropped straight back down to the launch pad, buckling and fracturing under its own weight, and then exploding in an all-consuming fireball as all of the energy stored for its trip to space was spent in the fraction of a second.

"They've been playing it over and over on TV," my roommate said as he stood before the television set in the common area of our room. I came up and stood beside him and saw the now-famous shot of the aftermath of the explosion, the main fireball already expanded to its full dimension and now mostly grey-white, the two solid-fuel boosters flailing helplessly in near-space and then self-destructing as they were designed to do should something go horribly wrong, as had obviously happened.

And then the image switched to Challenger on the launch pad, all intact, as if the previous seconds of the broadcast had merely been a horrible nightmare. Three, two, one, liftoff. And seventy-three seconds later the story, the end of which I had already seen, updated itself. And I wanted to cry.

It was on the second or third replay for me that I noticed the odd spike of flame spurting out from the side of the main booster. And it was a few replays afterward that an "expert" pointed it out as abnormal, and certainly something that investigators would be looking into.

And I stood there in front of my television set, short of sleep, wishing they would stop showing the arc of tragedy over and over, and yet unable to tear my eyes away from the images with each replay.

It was not a president. I don't know of any other single American whose sudden, untimely, or even violent death would cause a nation to pause as would a president's, as did Kennedy's. And it wasn't the six astronauts and one teacher whose deaths stopped us in our tracks. It was the failure of something that, to our knowledge, had never failed before: NASA. We had conquered space, we Americans had. We had captured the moon, and the brand name we had affixed to it was NASA. NASA, we had believed, could do anything. NASA, we had come to understand with a sense of awe, could achieve the impossible. And the impossible had happened: failure. Catastrophic, fatal failure.

The nation paused and cried, not only for the seven valiant souls extinguished on that day, but because, despite the lofty goals and astounding achievements our nation had made under the banner of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, we saw the first evidence of her crumbling edifice created by the ever increasing demand for perfection in a world of shrinking funds. Corners were cut, the evidence bore out. Oversight was overlooked. Sacrifices were made in order to get the next shuttle into space on schedule. Those who paid for these shortcomings were not just the seven crew who lost their lives that day, but it was every human being who watched in horror as those seven lives were lost, who felt their hearts stop beating for an instant, whose faith in this nation's brain-trust was shaken to the core, or even broken.

And now it's twenty years later. Every January 28th for the past ninteen years we have been revisited by the spectacular imagery of a nation's pride going up quite literally in flames. As we reflect on our tragic loss, we should also reflect on what has been learned since then. There are certain things in our world for which no penny should be spared. I don't speak of the lives of the astronauts. If our goal is the betterment of or the advancement of our species, if our goal is the better understanding of our world through exploration of the space around us, then we should responsibly spend every penny necessary to make sure nothing hinders the process. If we endeavor always to move forward, if we place learning at the forefront of our purpose instead of budget, then we will protect not only the lives of the daring souls who venture forth in the nose of the rocket, but as well the psyches of those left on the ground to watch, cheer, and reap the rewards.


dassall