I was sitting in 2nd period typing class when the Challenger blew up. But I don’t remember how we learned about it, whether some student had listened to the radio between classes or whether the principal made an announcement. What I do remember is turning around in my seat, my heart heavy and fallen in my chest, and looking at the faces of my friends. We were paralyzed.

It was the worst national tragedy we’d known. Most of us in that school system had spent one morning of second grade assembled before the TV watching the first shuttle flight. That day we were indoctrinated with the third dream of the space program, the re-usable spacecraft. On January 28, 1986, we learned the difference between the ideals of dreams and the costs of progress.

Today, space shuttle flights are mundane (a testament to the program's success), and no new goal—no new compelling goal—has been named. There’s the space station, of course, but for some reason, perhaps because the work is tedious and achieved by indetectibly small steps, it has failed to rouse passion.

And today, the tragedy is no less, but it is different. There’s the odd coincidence that both of the lost flights carried symbolic first-time crew, sure—this one an international show. But the climate is different. The nation is anxious over terrorist threat at home and war abroad. The economy sucks and we've got a foot caught in the stirrup of a runaway administration. The loss of the shuttle today is a blow to patriotism; in my mind, it’s a blow to the nationalistic hubris that is acutely felt in our foreign policy. The message is that we have loss to tend to at home. But I'm not confident the demogogues will feel it; they'll dismiss it, like they did our mourning of the WTC attack. And here we'll be, crazy with anxiety, waiting for the next sudden death.

I wonder if the debate over whether it is too costly to send people into space will return. I never understand this position. Space travel tests the limits of human ability, and so it must include loss.