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You know, it took me half an hour to put this thread together and now I don't have anything to say.

I want to kick something and I want to break stuff and I want to cry.

Fuck.

...

...

What they all said. This is Very Bad.

It is a funny thing.

Every day, from the Middle East, we hear of busses being blown up, full of schoolchildren and shoppers going about their business. In the cities of America, more people are gunned down in an hour than were lost on the Columbia.

But somehow, when we lose this second shuttle, we lose a little of the spirit of those aboard. A little of their intrepid vision and excitement, and "Jeez, look at me up in this goddam ship in outerspace" -ness.

Anyway, there really aren't words.

Just pass the bottle and here's to them.

I found out just how much I detest Howard Stern.

They all say they died doing what they wanted to do. No, flying into space is what they wanted to do. Going out in flames as their craft blew up is not.
My heart hurts for their families...

Fuck fuck FUCK. What a heartwrenching thing. I grew up with Apollo, and early on in my IT career threw myself at NASA several times like a horny teenager, to no avail.

Can't sit still, spent an hour on the heavy bag, now I think it's time to eat butter and bacon and drink bourbon and other things that start with B.

Don't know what else to say. Except that if I were King, NASA would get about 20x the money it gets now.

The only thing I like about living where I do is the cool, almost Dadaesque, often picture-only public access TV cannel we get from NASA, where for hours you can watch unedited transmissions from whatever mission control is talking to. I'd been watching the Columbia crew do it's thing for the past few days in the same way I used to watch MTV real world marathons, just left on, in the background. For this reason I felt closer to this group than previous shuttle crews.

Now, imagine if you found yourself into one of those Real World marathons, and suddenly they all blew up.

Actually, don't, because that'd be really funny.

Point is, I don't know what you're referring to specifically, bunnyfire, but if Howard Stern said something along the lines of "hey, they got to die being astronauts", then I'm willing to believe he didn't come to that thought glibly, because it was exactly mine as well, and I certainly didn't mean it to be funny.
I'm sorry for their relatives, for the people who knew them, but I'm not sorry for the crew at all. I thought about it, and I'm pretty sure if you told them this was going to happen, I'll bet they would have gone anyway. You have to die in life, you may as well die defining what you are.
They got to die being Astronauts.

Also, Kalpana Chawla? Kind of a hottie.

Thank you, kaf.

And, thanks to ColdChef for a great tagline.

.

Dear d. r., i was referring to one of his "stooges" managing to get thru to Dan Rather on the air, purportedly to discuss a giant hunk of debris from the shuttle in his back yard-then saying it looked like someone's teeth (he mentioned an individual who I am not familiar with.) They immediately cut off the call and a weary looking Dan Rather had to tell us it was a "prank call".

It made me want to throw up. I have heard these clowns do this sort of thing on other newscasts, and somewhere I heard today that Stern actually has people on his payroll to do this sort of crap. If that is true he needs to be off the air.

I'm sorry-seven people died today, and this nation is in shock, and someone pulls this crap.
Not acceptable, Mr. Resin.

Couldn't disagree more.

I'm no fan of Howard Stern, but more power to him. Freedom of expression is a dual-edged sword, and protecting offensive speech is part of the obligation.

But, to each their own. As it should be.

I think this is the sum of what I feel: sorrow because it represents some of the best work our government and society can produce, and bitter that it's such a small token of our potential.

I love the space program because it is so completely idealistic, and practices inquiry for the sake of inquiry. It's the last government program that I think isn't completely beset by cynicism, and astronauts represent some of the best abilities of what we all pretend we are capable of. They became heroes not because they died tragically, but because they lived the best lives they were capable of, and rose to the tops of their fields to fly in SPACE. What could be cooler?

I'm a sap. I'm sad because they died, but also because it represents so much about what we are capable of, but continue to fall far short of fulfilling in the greater world.

Ah. Well, crank calls are different ball of wax, bunny. I thought you were upset with a remark he'd made.

The official line from the Stern show is that the crank callers are fans, operating entirely independently of Howard, who on-air alternately acts bemused/disgusted/ semi-defends them by pointing out that they illustrate the fact that The News will put any un-factchecked shit on the air and make it seem legitimate. I can go either way with that line of reasoning.

At any rate, the intent of the prankers, ostensibly, is to culture jam The Media, not mock the tragedy it's reporting on.. whether or not it can do one without the other is up for grabs.

I used to watch the NASA channel when i lived in Ithaca, NY. Sometimes I would stay up all night doing it. I would hate having to try not to pick my nose all the time.

It's been a little over 13 hours and I'm still fairly floored. I was in Florida when the Challenger exploded, and now Columbia explodes practically over my house. I'm beginning to think that I should not be allowed within the flight paths of space shuttles, as I may just be bad juju for the space program.

My heart goes out to the children who lost parents, the parents who lost children, and the family members who will always have an empty chair at gatherings.

I've been keeping my head down, working on a freelance project, just trying not to think about it, then I took a break to poke around on the web and found that a friend in dallas posted this and I just kinda lost it.

...

kudos to mattpfeff and eyeballkid for really awesome, moving posts on your blogs. As someone who went to the same high school as Judith Resnick, I hope that these seven become a new generation's heroes.

Takes me back.

Much less of a surprise than it was the first time, in fact the surprise is that it's taken this long for it to happen again.

Sad for seven people to die, but it's not like hopping in the SUV and heading down to Walmart. The 'nauts were well aware of the dangers, I'm sure, and willing to take the risk.

Whether this will spur the gov't to a renewed sense of mission in space exploration remains to be seen. My guess is not, and that is what would actually make those deaths a tragedy.

I have a glib tongue; but some things beggar it. On those occasions, I can only look to what those wiser than I have said on the subject, and take solace in that wisdom. -UF

"Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned."

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

I think the thing that just about broke me up is when Buzz Aldrin read a stanza of a poem someone had emailed him today, and he just about lost it-they had to cut to back to the anchor for a moment. It breaks my heart to see these old guys near tears. Even Peter Jennings had a wobble in his voice tonight...

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