We, Who Are About to Die

Fortuna Audaces Iuvat - Fortune Favors the Bold
"Who Dares, Wins" - Special Air Service motto

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the Challenger shuttle disaster. On that cold January morning the space shuttle Challenger rocketed into the sky, its solid rocket boosters burning rapidly towards a failing joint and rubber O-Ring seal that had cracked in the cold. Seventy-three seconds into the flight when the fire hit the joint it blew out the side, and hit the fuel tanks like a blow from an angry and fearful god of the skies. The explosion took the lives of seven crewmembers, six astronauts and one civilian who were daring to follow mankind’s dreams of the stars.
Astronauts Ellison Onizuka, Mike Smith, Dick Scobee, Greg Jarvis, Ron McNair and Judy Resnick, and schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe experienced one minute and thirteen seconds of the dream before their lives were cut short in a fireball and they took the bigger journey into the greater unknown.
But they were not the first to die chasing that dream, nor would they be the last.
On January 27^th 1967 Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee died aboard Apollo 1, still on the launch pad, when a spark ignited the pure oxygen atmosphere of the sealed capsule during pre-flight tests.
On April 24^th 1964 Vladimir Komarov reentered the earths atmosphere in the malfunctioning Soyuz 1 capsule and died when the parachute lines tangled plummeting Soyuz 1 into the earth at two hundred miles an hour.
In May of 1967 the crew of Soyuz 11, Georgi Dobrovolsky, Viktor Patsayev, and Vladislav Volkov, died when a malfunctioning valve caused the capsule to depressurize just prior to reentry.
No astronaut or cosmonaut would die engaged in a mission again until the Challenger disaster, and then it would be fifteen years before another sacrifice would be demanded by the fates of dreams and the sky.
On February 1^st 2003 the crew of the space shuttle Columbia, Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Dr. Kalpana Chawla, Laurel B. Clark and Ilan Ramon, died when the shuttle, suffering damage to its protective tiles, blew up over the western United States during reentry. It is quite possible that these seven people knew or at least suspected they were going to die, well ahead of time, and proceeded ahead, chasing the dream to infinity.

We live in a world of sports hero’s, movie stars and rock gods. People who, on whole, are shallow, fatuous, and often as not disgusting and disagreeable people, more concerned with image, money and whatever “cause of the month” will get them the most attention. Among them are rapists, thieves, murderers, people who use drugs to avoid the really real world, and narcissists of the highest order who have no greater dream or vision, and no desire to live for something greater, and certainly, perhaps most certainly of all, no strength to die for something greater.
While those people are made hero’s there are quieter, smarter, stronger men and women who dare to brave the unknown, the unknowable, and the dangerous to chase down what may be the greatest dream of the human race: The secrets of the heavens - The glittering lights and shimmering sights of that great expanse of space, the realm of new worlds and gods.
In the end, it will not be the movie gods and rock stars who will carry mankind into the future, into new hope, new worlds. It will not be the sports hero’s who open the doors for us all. It will be these quiet people willing to serve a dream, live a dream, and die for that dream.
It is my prayer, whispered desperately to those heavens, that we will hold on long enough, that they may deliver that dream to us before it is lost to the murky depths of forgotten consciousness.
”Go! at throttle up” the stars are ahead.