I don't really believe in psychic stuff, but I had a weird thing happen to me yesterday. First, you need to know that I am NOT a morning person and I NEVER wake up early naturally. On Friday night I went to sleep around 2 AM and then woke up, for absolutely no reason, at 8 AM exactly. This struck me as annoying, but not at all odd. Then, later yesterday, I learned that mission control lost contact with Columbia at exactly 8 AM Central time. That struck me as very strange.

I am so depressed about the Columbia thing. If I had my druthers, I would have sat in my apartment all day yesterday watching CNN coverage of the disaster. I'm glad I didn't, because the more I watched, and the more NPR I listened to in the car, the more depressed I became. I just kept thinking of these brilliant, enthusiastic scientists taking this enormous risk, hurtling themselves into and out of space at 18 times the speed of sound. How brave. I am so fed up with the misuse of the word "hero" recently, but I can't think of a better appellation for the seven people who died yesterday morning.

I think I associate the space program with hope, and that is why I was so struck by the disaster. I was trying to figure out why I was so horrified when the space shuttle blew up, but I barely flinched when a commuter jet crashed a few weeks ago in North Carolina. Many more people died in an equally terrible tragedy, but the space shuttle was so much more disheartening to me. The only thought that I keep coming back to is that space represents the future of man, the future of our civilization, and the astronauts are indeed the pioneers clearing the way for our inevitable wagon trains. They dedicate their lives to their own passion, but their work lays the foundation that the rest of us will build from in the future as we extend into the solar system and beyond.

When space shuttles blow up, I think I become so despondent because I feel that a severe blow has been dealt to our scientific and cultural advancement. Moreso than a plane crashing, a space shuttle respresents human ingenuity and, to borrow from David Quammen, "weediness" as a species. I grieve for our loss and for the loss of the families of the astronauts.

I'm off to watch some more CNN.