“Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation. We choose to go to the moon. 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! This goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win!” So President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had declared during his term in office.
Early this morning at Cape Kennedy, seagulls hovered over the launch site for the American space shuttle Challenger, which was preparing to take off in a few hours. Their eyes surveyed the slightest frothing of the water as their sharp cries pierced the calm before the storm, before the thunderous rumbling of the rockets began. At this moment they moved against a sky that was still pure, still intact, but soon, soon the blue would be torn by a flash of light and flame, and the rocket would pass through each stratum of the sky before disappearing into the distance, the unknown, the final frontier: space. The void. Its mission was to release a second tracking and data relay satellite into the atmosphere, which would be used to observe Halley’s Comet, the most famous comet known to mankind, that small celestial body made up of a kernel of ice and dust surging in a tireless orbit around the earth.
The countdown had begun.
Three, two, one…Challenger propelled upward from the launch pad, emitting thick plumes of dark smoke. Challenger rose around ten meters off the ground and the gulls veered off, startled; as the cloud of smoke billowed out, the cloud of gulls receded. They darted in all directions, crying not with birdsong but with panic. The water whirled and churned under the blast, and the ground shook. Challenger the giant, a monster not of the deep but of technology, lifted off and began to build to its cruising speed of three thousand two hundred kilometres per hour. A monster of technology, built to lead the charge in mankind’s conquest of space.
Thirteen seconds later, a cry rang out in the atmosphere; a swansong. Challenger had exploded, and the seven members of its crew were killed instantly. On the ground, the engineers’ hearts stopped. In the end, we are dust, and unto the dust of the earth we shall return; so Genesis tells us. Like Icarus who would touch the sun, Challenger too would fall before its time.
Alan Alfredo Geday