RISKS AND GLORY FOR THE BRAVEST

By Christopher Hitchens

Just to give you an idea of the sheer speed...

At dawn on Saturday some observers noticed sparks flying from the left
wing of shuttle as it made its deceleration from about 14,000mph to a
velocity appropriate for landing in Florida and re-entering the
atmosphere of Earth. (On average days of orbit, the shuttle can go at
17,000mph).

The shuttle was over California by the time the first signs of a fiery
death were detected. The first noticeable debris fell over Texas.

By the end of the day, other material was reported on the Navajo
reservation in north-eastern Arizona - in the same state where I am
writing - and as far away as the lakes of Louisiana.

If you crash and burn from space, you leave a wide footprint. This was a
craft that could cross a continent in under 30 minutes. "How art thou
fallen from heaven, oh Lucifer, son of the morning."

In Tucson, the calamity was experienced as a local one.

Michael Anderson, the black "mission specialist" who died, is from
around here. So is one of the luckless occupants of the still-orbiting
space station, now awaiting his ride home from the next shuttle or the
next Russian Soyuz mission.

But all attempts to localise and familiarise the tragedy are banal. A man
on a space station is not like a man who has missed an airport
connection and who patiently checks in for the next available flight.

He is a man operating at the very limit of what the human imagination
can cope with. It was clever of NASA to call its workhorse craft a
"shuttle", as if space travel had somehow suddenly become ordinary
and routine.

But this is not just a failure in two out of the last 100 missions. It
disproves the idea that tramp-steamers will ever ply between the
planets on an everyday basis. The Columbia craft was 22 years old.
Does that fact now seem reassuring, as it might have done last week?

Events in celestial regions put an especially heavy tax upon the
resources of presidential speech-writers. The Bush team was probably
wise in not trying to outbid Ronald Reagan's bravura performance
almost two decades ago. The President stuck to piety and to the
supposedly consoling but ridiculous idea that God counts men and
women as he counts stars, and has brought these men and women
"home," if not actually back where they wanted to be.

If these propositions were even half-true, one ought obviously to rejoice
at the good fortune of the crew.

But then, if such propositions were true, Osama bin Laden would be as
good a theologian as Billy Graham.

(Ronald Reagan nicked the closing lines of his famous speech from a
Canadian poem called High Flight that was read every night at close-
down on Washington's Channel Ten: nobody noticed except me and
nobody paid me a bit of attention).

So it was thought brilliant for the then-President to say that the victims
had slipped the surly bonds of Earth, when in fact they had blown up on
take-off. This crew, in bold contrast, were immolated while trying to
land. Either you like this sort of thing or you don't.

I think myself that both crews would much rather have completed their
missions but then, I have no mandate to speak for them or for the deity.)

In the national subconscious there lurked the idea that perhaps
terrorism had something to do with it and this suspicion has only been
fed by the official denial of something that can't even be alleged yet.

There's usually a foreign guest on every shuttle trip - of course, this
week it had to be Ilan Ramon, of the Israeli Air Force, a young man
who, in 1981, had helped to destroy the French-built Iraqi reactor at
Osirak.

Iraqi statements to the effect that God had interested himself in blowing
up the shuttle made as much sense as the Bush interpretation of the
divine will, or possibly even less. A more secular doubt occurred to me -
the impending intervention in Iraq requires that all sorts of "smart"
technology works perfectly all the time...

However, the standard of warfare doesn'tconstitute the standard in this
case, any more than the standard of superstition.

We have just been reminded that there is a frontier which it will always
be hazardous and glorious to cross, and that it can be crossed only with
great bravery by, say, an Indian woman who has struggled to become
both a natural scientist and an American citizen.

Better to employ the words of Stephen Spender: "Born of the sun, they
travelled a short while towards the sun/ And left the vivid air signed with
their honour."

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair magazine

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