Last Sunday I had a premonition about the shuttle Columbia. I was looking at my calendar and noted that this was the worst week for the American space program. Something inside me said the jinx would continue. Apparently it has.
January 27th, 1967, during a test on Apollo 1, a fire broke out in the capsule. Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee died horribly.
January 28th, 1986, during liftoff, the space shuttle Challenger catastrophicly exploded. Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe all lost their lives.
Now, today, February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia inexplicably broke up on re-entry. Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, Michael P. Anderson, David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon are lost to us.
I wish I could personally thank each and every one of them... and all other human space explorers, too. It is due to their efforts that I have hope for mankind's future. To be honest, the space program is one of the few sources of hope I have left.
Although I'm a sceptic by nature, this is a time I fervently wish the old wives' tale "bad things come in threes" to be true.
