This was
Icarus drowning.

A farmer was plowing his field, somewhere.  In Texas, perhaps.
A comet hurtled past the edge of the atmosphere, concerned with itself sweating in the sun, the 3000-degree friction heat, that melted the wing’s wax.
Columbia was descending to Earth, in a moment, when in the sky there was a flash, quite noticed — unlike Brughel’s depiction.
The comet fragmented, bit by flaming bit.  And only a trail of curling smoke — a vaporous, feathery white — remained.

This was
America drowning.

Landscape with the fall of Columbia.

Musings on an American Icarus

By Kate Henderson ‘05

The above is my own adaptation of William Carlos Williams’ poem “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.”  The original poem’s inspiration and namesake was a 16^th century oil painting by Pieter Brughel, illustrating the tragic conclusion to the Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus.

Upon first glance, Brughel’s work is mundane in character, with its hazy green hue, its subjects focused on routine.  The observer is first drawn left, where a red-shirted farmer and his horse, plowing a hill, descend into shadows.  The eyes then wander center, toward the yellow sun melting above a darkening harbor, beyond a shepherd tending his flock by the beach.  Everything is turned away from the boy, Icarus, whose flailing legs appear, upon closer examination, among waves and falling feathers, in the darkness on the lower right.  Icarus, the young boy who ignored his father’s warnings, soared too near the hot sun, melted his waxen wings, and perished.  But the world of the painting coldly progresses, a cynical commentary on a cold world that turns its back on this quiet display of human suffering.  The loss of an arrogant little boy who caused his own demise means little to poor laborers preoccupied with their own respective struggles for survival.

Yet in America, we take time to mourn our Icari.  On February 1, 2003, the Columbia space shuttle vaporized during reentry, killing seven astronauts.  While the event was, crassly put, a colossal setback for NASA, the tragedy instilled grief within the American public, who genuinely empathized with the fallen explorers and their families.  Predictably, the opportunistic American press tore into the story as voraciously as the reentry friction ripped through an alleged structural flaw in the shuttle’s hull, igniting an explosion of upsetting, indelible images of the seven who met their fiery end while soaring 75 miles above the earth. 

Meanwhile, however, countless others elsewhere in the world endured much misery no less deserving of the press’s attention and the public’s compassion.  But these stories of war, famine, death, and disease barely made news editors blink.  In the words of Brown University anthropology professor Daniel Smith, “One has to ask one’s self: why does the Columbia get so much press, while thousands, everyday, can die in quiet?”

Our media’s fixation on the Columbia reflects the culturally symbolic status of space exploration within the American psyche.  Amidst the fall-out of such disasters, I cannot help but wonder why America continually pours colossal amounts of resources into such an ambitious program with few immediately tangible benefits.  However, while critics complain that the $14.8 billion space program is a dangerous and wasteful relic of showy, Cold-War Space Race diplomacy, American politicians and civilians refuse to relinquish the exploration of space.  The reasons for our steadfastness are complex, heavily tainted by our country’s ambition, politics, and history.

As citizens of a wealthy nation complacently riding the coattails of victorious World War II, Americans grew arrogant, their largely unchallenged confidence precariously buoyed up by a dirigible-sized collective ego.  Like the Hindenburg, however, only a tiny spark, in the form of an aluminum, basketball-sized Russian satellite, was needed to ignite a terrific explosion among the American public.  On October 4, 1957, Russia’s little Sputnik greeted our planet as the first man-made, Earth-orbiting satellite.  Thus began the Space Race, an ambitious effort to subdue America’s technological Napoleon complex. 

“Now, somehow, the sky seemed almost alien,” recalled former President Lyndon B. Johnson of the infamous Sputnik night, as he stared into the black sky.  “I also remember the profound shock of realizing that it might be possible for a nation to have technological superiority over ours.”

As a direct result of American crisis of confidence, the Eisenhower administration established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration within a year of Sputnik’s launch at the height of the Cold War.  Building bigger rockets and venturing farther from Earth, by the end of the 1960s America’s space program had all but eclipsed the Soviet’s own, having planted our star-spangled banner on the surface of the Moon.

The space program is undeniably linked with the politics of this era of American history.  The lunar landings, the space probes, the intelligence satellites, and Reagan’s Star Wars program all stemmed from the elaborate diplomatic game of one-upping the Communists.  In the words of James S. McDonnell, builder of the Mercury and Gemini space capsules, “The creative conquest of space will serve as a wonderful substitute for war.”  Yet the American government continued its conquest, even after the Cold War’s end, striving deeper into space.  On some level, foreign governments must have been wondering exactly what the Americans were trying to prove. 

While all societies are faced with image maintenance, Smith notes, “Anytime you see such bold assertions like the space program—on the flipside—they reveal a certain amount of insecurity within a society, maybe masking underlying fears.”

The space program worked to squelch American fears of inferiority by publicly showcasing the boundlessness of American innovation and technology via fiery Cape Canaveral launches, serene space walks, and surreal Hubble photographs.  Thus the space program came to represent America’s power, her mastery of the universe, to her citizens, allies, and enemies alike. 

"Now, somehow, the sky seemed almost alien," recalled former President Lyndon B. Johnson of the infamous Sputnik night.

As Smith observed, “The space program has stood symbolically for a larger shared mythology among Americans, reaffirming a certain confidence in what it means to be American.”  By this argument, we as a nation mourned the shuttle’s destruction as a lost cultural symbol of our patriotism, technological superiority, and military power.  Yet, to me, this explanation seems disturbingly superficial.

“You do sometimes wonder if the only way to get this kind of program started is a war.”  Peter Schultz, a Brown University professor of planetary geology and director of the Rhode Island NASA Space Grant, contemplated his critics’ arguments reluctantly, but very thoughtfully.

“Exploration is something mandated by the government,” he said. “You need to have an imperative, a mandate.  It’s what gave Apollo that sense of immediacy.  You need to have the attitude, ‘We’re going to do this,’ and the politics of the time helped.  But this was beyond Russian conflict; you were doing something for the advancement of mankind.  You simply had to.”

 But mandate or no, for NASA to take off, so to speak, there needed to be desire even before there was war, said Schultz, “And missiles and weaponry are not the stuff of dreams.”

Who among us can truly say that they have never ogled the night sky, fantasizing about what lies beyond the bounds of our atmosphere?  As children we looked into the sky and dream of one day somersaulting weightless in a spaceship somewhere in the Milky Way. This young dreamer wants to discover for herself whether the Man in the Moon is really made of green cheese, whether strawberry Jell-o really does float around the air in big red globs that you can slurp in one gigantic, wide-mouthed gulp.

In the early twentieth century, the growing market for mass media first stimulated children’s curiosity about outer space.  Science-fiction movies like The Day That Time Stood Still, surrealist painters like Chesley Bonestell, and stereo-viewers displaying three-dimensional lunar images triggered American imaginations as never before.  With the media’s help, said Schultz, “Space became popular culture.” 

In the forties and fifties, these popular images inspired children as they grew up to become a whole new generation of scientists dreaming of space stations and lunar landings.  Like Schultz, they “looked into that telescope one day as a kid, and never look back again.”  Importantly, however, these children were not worried about Communism and nuclear arms races, though such concerns may later have gained importance.  These children were naturally curious.

Astronauts don't risk their lives for petty diplomacy any more than children look at the sky and dream of designing the next ballistic missile.

“What you really ought to be asking is ‘Why do people climb Mount Everest?’ or ‘Why circumnavigate the globe in a balloon?’ There’s no politics in that,” Schultz said. “Though it’s obviously risky, it really is part of human nature to explore.”

Although I cannot say whether we are genetically programmed for curiosity, certainly exploration and discovery are integral parts of American culture.  Our culture encourages ambition: we need to have more, to be more, to know more. Maybe such progressive tendencies originated from our society’s origins as Puritan pilgrims.  Or perhaps this desire to seek out new frontiers and explore new territories traces back to the Columbian days of swashbuckling conquistadors, dreaming of conquest and adventure.  Regardless, our collective ambition is rooted in our collective history, and we constantly search for ways to expend this exploratory energy. 

If you were to ask a mountain climber, “Why Everest?” they would inevitably respond with something to the effect of “because it’s there.” There is certain satisfaction in successfully summitting any such precipice.  But if one had asked Columbus, “Why explore?” he might have answered something like, “Because we don’t know what’s there.”

There are increasingly fewer unknowns left on Earth, however.  The New Worlds were conquered.  The Everests were climbed.  Excepting perhaps the oceans and the Earth’s interior, we have run short of Earthly frontiers.  In the words of physicist Stephen Hawking, “To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.”  Thus, 19^th century American scientists, thirsting for new challenges, turned their eyes upwards, towards the vast frontier of outer space and never looked back again.

In his famous book The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe asks, “What is it that makes a man willing to sit on top of a giant Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan, or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?”

Escaping from captive gravity is dangerous.  Columbia’s crewmembers now join the astronauts of Apollo 1 and Challenger, all lost in the name of space exploration.  Each of these astronauts must be aware of the inherent risks of their calling.  Man was not meant to fly, and the consequences are grave when our engineered wings fail.

Perhaps our political landscape, both power-hungry and insecure, catalyzed our government’s willingness to invest in a space program.  Perhaps without Cold War tensions, Neil Armstrong would never have placed his footprints on the Moon. 

Returning to Wolfe’s question, however, astronauts don’t risk their lives for petty diplomacy any more than children look at the sky and dream of designing the next ballistic missile.  To quote President Bush, “This cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we choose; it is a desire within the human heart.”

From its warlike origins, NASA has become a cultural indulgence of the American spirit.  Many of us Americans laboring in the fields and tending our flocks may never see a wild frontier as did our ancestors in a time when there were still terrestrial frontiers to be found.  In a way, however, thanks to modern mass media, we can vicariously console our curiosity through the stories of discovery brought home by our scientists and astronauts. America will never turn its back to the chosen few who are fortunate enough to pursue our collective ambition, for at heart, we are still a throng of little boys and girls who dream of soaring through the sky.  

Kate would like to give a special thanks to the Brown professors who contributed to this piece: Professor Daniel Smith, Professor Peter Schultz, and Professor Peter Hopmann.