TAP Online joins all Americans in mourning the loss of the seven astronauts this weekend aboard the space shuttle Columbia.
Why do these seven deaths affect us as a nation so deeply? Everyone has his or her own theory, and many were eloquently recited this weekend. My preferred explanation can be found in something published 17 years ago, the afternoon the Challenger exploded, and it didn't contain a single word. I thought of it on Saturday soon after I heard the news about the Columbia, and I suspect many others did as well: It's this cartoon by Doug Marlette (then at The Charlotte Observer) depicting a bald eagle shedding a single tear and looking up at the sky.
If you follow the eyes of Marlette's eagle, astronauts are more than daring scientists who take risks to broaden human knowledge; they are symbols of humanity's thirst for progress, whatever form it may take, precisely because their laboratory is the sky. When people say, "The sky's the limit," they mean to convey an unbridled optimism, to say that there are no limits. American optimism is, of course, a well-documented phenomenon. But in addition, it is not insignificant that the Israeli astronaut who was aboard the Columbia came from a country whose national airline's name, translated literally, means, "To the skies" -- or that his country (like ours) was once a pie-in-the-sky dream before struggling into existence and surviving, against long odds. Astronauts dive headfirst into limitless space. When they succeed, they convince us that nothing need remain beyond the reach of human ingenuity or human bravery. And when they fall, they remind us that, sadly, this cannot always be the case -- in space or here on earth.
So why did Saturday's events touch Americans so profoundly? It has something to do with the fact that many of us grew up playing with telescopes, learning about constellations, leaning back in planetariums and gazing up into the darkness. For the vast majority of Americans, the sky appealed to us most during our childhood, at a time when we did not understand the concept of limits. As adults we may accept limits, but still we seek out evidence that they can be defied. In the end, space exploration may be the most dramatic evidence we have, not just that limits can be broken but that we can break them collectively. After all, the astronauts of the Columbia weren't up there for mere exhilaration, or even just for science -- they were there because we sent them; they were there representing us.
In Marlette's 1986 cartoon, the bald eagle cried a solitary tear. After this weekend, it is unfortunately time to add a second tear to that drawing. But now as then, one imagines that the eagle is looking upward, toward the sky.
Richard Just is the editor of The American Prospect Online.
