20 years ago, time stood still

For me, the future has always been about the unexplored, the unexplained, the dream waiting to wake. It holds itself erect, arms outstretched above to the sky, seeing itself beyond the day shining down on it. The future is hope, and I can not bear to see it with a shadow across its face.

On this date 20 years ago, Mom and I were ending my lunch break from training for our new jobs at Colonial Williamsburg. We were being prepared to teach early American history to the many visitors to that museum, when the class cut-up (surprisingly, that role was not mine, at the time) came racing into the gymnasium-style room where we had been assembled, telling us "The shuttle has blown up." We didn't believe him, at first. He took the time to convince us, and, at the end of class, we all went home to watch video footage on the news, mourn those lost in the explosion, and wonder what this meant for the space program.

This came at a time when many Americans were taking space travel for granted, and a few others were declaring it "too costly, nothing to gain". Our economy was still recovering from the Carter years, and there was strong support for the view that cash poured into NASA could be better used for earth-bound domestic programs. Consensus among those who didn't work in sciences was that President Reagan was a nutter for believing in the Strategic Defense Initiative (derisively nick-named "Star Wars"), and that messing with just about any real science was going to get us all killed. From nuclear power to the ozone depletion, everything "unnatural" was getting linked to Armageddon. Greenpeace and its panic salesmen were everywhere, and even I had begun to fall for some of their alarmist propaganda.

Still, our family was raised true believers in science and knowledge and rational thought, as well as imagination and hope. We had watched the early spaceship launches on a little black-and-white television, and, when the Eagle had landed on the moon, we not only saw the event unfold on tv, we ran out into the yard to look up to the sky, to see if we could spot the place where the module had touched down. We camped out, that night, among the mosquitoes, and nothing interfered with our glorious dreams of stars and Barsoomians.

Thuvia, John Carter, and all those dreams came crashing to earth with the loss of the Challenger and its crew. This nation had not, I thought, the will to rebuild as we had done after the Apollo 1 accident 19 years and one day earlier. We were tired, demoralized, and worried over lives and hearing the deep chants about money lost. Our leaders had serious discussions about ending funding for NASA, making it nothing more than a page in the history books, a forgotten fantasy.

It took some time -- and much rethinking by Americans -- before the program recovered its stride, but, like a child who has burned himself trying to peer into a pot on the stove, the nation has not seen its enthusiasm for touching down on new worlds completely return. We seem content to send robots to the edges of our solar system to send home photographs and data, where once we talked of daring the long ride for ourselves.

Still, I watch the night skies and see what we've learned by the courage of those who have chosen to step away from this burdensome earth, and I still find hope. John Carter lives.