SpaceX: Keep Pushing the Limits

"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.

PBS: Columbia Shuttle 10th Anniversary

Tonight on PBS you can see Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope, marking the 10th anniversary of the shuttle disaster.  The PBS special will primarily highlight the life of  Colonel Ilan Ramon, a fighter pilot and son of Holocaust survivors who became the first astronaut from Israel.  Here is PBS's description of tonight's program: 

Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope goes behind the scenes to explore the “mission within the mission” for Ramon, who carried into space a miniature Torah scroll that had survived the horrors of the Holocaust, given to a boy in a secret bar mitzvah observed in the pre-dawn hours in the notorious Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. The bar mitzvah boy grew up to become Israel’s lead scientist for the mission, Joachim “Yoya” Joseph.

The film follows the scroll’s path into Ramon’s hands, and the dramatic moment when he tells its story live to the world from the flight deck of Columbia. From the depths of hell to the heights of space, his simple gesture would serve to honor the hope of a nation and to fulfill a promise made to generations past and future. 

Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope includes drawings from the concentration camp made in secret by a camp inmate, and archival NASA footage of the astronauts as they prepared for their mission. Interviewees include Ilan Ramon’s widow, Rona Ramon, and other Columbia crew family members; astronaut Garrett Reisman and other members of NASA’s space program; Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean; former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and many others. The film was shot on location throughout the world, from Jerusalem to the Kennedy Space Center to Washington, D.C.