Unending Flight

That flight for the crew of the U.S.S. Challenger began today in 1986.

I came back from a morning class and flipped on the TV in my room to see Peter Jennings talking and video of a space launch. I knew nobody broadcast launches anymore, so I wondered what was up, until as I watched there was the bright burst of smoke and the Y-shape of the two boosters peeling off in different directions. Investigations, accusations and such followed, and although a supposedly safer NASA culture emerged from the process by the time Discovery took off in September of 1988, not too much happened to anyone in particular. Bob Walkenhorst had written a song for his band The Rainmakers a few years earlier called "Rockin' at the T-Dance," on the album The Rainmakers. In it, writing about the Apollo 1 fire about 20 years earlier, the Apollo 13 near-disaster and the collapse of a walkway at the Hyatt House Hotel in Kansas City, Walkenhorst said this:

You can still see the ghosts,
but you can't see the sense;
Why they let the monkey go
and blamed the monkey wrench.

Ignore the human element -- of anything, good or bad, success or failure -- and little good is likely to come of it.