"Despair is always the wrong response to a failure during exploration and
it isn’t disciplined engineering. When the entire crew of Apollo was
burned alive in a capsule test, President Johnson pushed our moon
mission forward and engineers delivered. When Space Shuttle Challenger
exploded, President Reagan proudly redoubled our commitment to space, we
fixed the launch system and we built a great space station. When
Columbia broke up on reentry we engineered work arounds and completed
the Space Shuttle program with pride. Once again, America’s brightest
engineers will collect the data, analyze the failure, improve the system
and move us forward into the future."
--Statement by Greg Autry, Assistant Professor with The Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial
Studies in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern
California, in a Space News editorial.