I remember Challenger.
I was working on a nuclear fusion reactor in a little lab in '86.
Our boss came in the lab and announced to us what happened. Then time stopped. Everybody in the company, that day, felt very strange. Grieving, and also unconscious and unformulated anxieties about how the general public will react to this mysterious thing that they don't understand that they call "technology". In the end, our fears were not unfounded for all Challenger flights stopped for two years, and many projects, including one at our company, was cancelled, causing many job losses and wastes hopes of scientific innovation. Even a small company like ours (100 workers) was financially affected by the Challenger accident.
Objectively, this loss of a few lives is only a tiny fraction of what is lost every day on the roads, yet, it had a deep significance for our self-image as humans, as living creatures exploring the unknown.
In retrospect, what seems stranger is how is it that we came to expect no casualties in such endeavours. As Burt Rutan, developpers of many experimental aircrafts once said, if you don't have people dying, it's probably because you're not pushing the technology enough.
On Edwards air force base, streets are named after test pilots who died in the course of duty. There are a lot of streets...
I think that this one will have much less impact than Challenger, because it happened not at the beginning of the mission but on the return trip. Also because it is the second such accident.
|