Shuttle saga harkens to another Discovery
W ASHINGTON — Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, reaching the falls of the Missouri on their epic journey west, made a risky calculation. They would keep the expedition together, pressing on without sacrificing two soldiers to get word of their progress to President Thomas Jefferson.
For more than a year after the spring of 1804, nothing from the Corps of Discovery. Then, on July 13, 1805, a letter. And only when Lewis was safely back in St. Louis in the fall of 1806 did he explain his silence: It was “better to let the government as well as our friends for a moment feel some anxiety for our fate than to wrisk (sic) so much.”
More than fret. As historian Stephen Ambrose would bluntly put it, “most Americans had given up on them.”
In 2005, the return of another intrepid crew under the “Discovery” banner reminds us that we carry a different burden in the Space Age. Our anxiety comes not from ignorance, but from watching the astronauts’ fate unfold in real time. Shuttle Commander Eileen Collins and her crew of six took an entire nation along on their high-stakes ride.
President John F. Kennedy, whose vision set Americans on their space journey, declared in 1962 that “we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
It is the hard that has been on view, as if we were beside Lewis and Clark for every near miss with the bears Lewis wrote about in his journals.
“Sometimes it’s just hard to watch,” astronaut Cady Coleman acknowledged early Tuesday on CNN’s live broadcast as Discovery’s infrared image offered visual confirmation that the ship — so far — had escaped Columbia’s tragic end.
President Bush watched the televised July 26 liftoff, just as JFK had done for the Mercury astronauts.
The mission, the first since Columbia broke up on re-entry Feb. 1, 2003, was billed as “Return to Flight.” NASA had to get Discovery safely into orbit and home again if it was to pursue Bush’s desire to take Americans back to the moon and on to Mars. The concern was evident in the president’s Aug. 2 phone call to the crew.
“And, obviously, as you prepare to come back, a lot of Americans will be praying for a safe return,” Bush told them, adding, “we’re with you.”
Even with Discovery’s triumphant return, the space shuttle fleet is grounded and NASA left to confront a recurring problem: Why did potentially lethal pieces of insulation foam break off the shuttle’s external tank on liftoff, as happened on the doomed Columbia?
John Glenn, one of the pioneering Mercury Seven, recalled in a televised interview early Tuesday that NASA reluctantly gave him the go-ahead in 1962 to take a small automatic camera aboard his “Friendship 7.” Discovery’s, on the other hand, may have been the most-photographed space flight ever. Indeed, it is easier to say what wasn’t documented than what was.
A camera positioned on the orbiter helped detect the errant insulation, even as it allowed Earth-bound Americans a spectacular view of the shuttle’s ascent. Video stream enabled us to follow along as Mission Specialist Stephen Robinson embarked on a spacewalk to do an unprecedented repair, removing protruding gap fillers from the shuttle’s belly.
Last Sunday, Robinson conducted the first podcast from space, offering a Web-streamed travelogue of his feat as compelling as any of Lewis’ journal entries:
“Just incredible to be way out there on the end of that (robotic) arm all by myself and see no evidence of humans anywhere. Just me and the space station and the space shuttle from a view that neither I nor anybody else has ever seen, and watch the sun come up over the bottom of the space shuttle. … I think that learning is what looking over the horizon is all about.”
They were supposed to be home Monday, but for bad weather in Florida.
On Tuesday, as the rescheduled landing approached, NASA’s Virtual Launch Control Center provided a minute-by-minute account. We learned the crew was awakened 8:39 the night before to get ready. “We sure hope we get our feet on the ground today,” radioed Mission Specialist Wendy Lawrence.
At 5:30 a.m. Tuesday — 23 minutes after the shuttle would have touched down at Cape Canaveral, if not for more bad weather — we were told that Discovery would be above Madagascar at 7:06 a.m.
At 6:12 a.m., the Web site reported that the astronauts were continuing “fluid loading” — drinking liquids — to prepare their bodies to re-enter Earth’s gravity.
Former astronaut Kathryn Sullivan told CNN that she would not share in a collective sigh of relief until “wheels stop” at California’s Edwards Air Force Base. That came at 8:13 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
“Welcome home, friends,” Mission Control radioed from Houston.
NASA’s Web site posting was euphoric: “Touchdown!”
It was Kennedy who said we do the hard things because it calls forth the best in us, and because we accept the challenge. That doesn’t come without sacrifice.
And it was President Gerald Ford, during the 1976 bicentennial, who told us why we press on, invoking a 1607 voyage to America by another ship called Discovery:
“The hallmark of the American adventure has been a willingness — even an eagerness — to reach for the unknown.”