I happened to stop by cnn.com yesterday just when NASA announced that they'd lost contact with the space shuttle Columbia. I immediately switched on the TV, and for the next thirty minutes I watched events as they unfolded. Aside from the terrible loss of life - a tragedy in and of itself - I knew that this would be a serious setback for the whole space program, already under a lot of pressure from the US government. Exploring space, expanding our horizons, costs a lot of money, and not everyone agrees that this is money well spent. I believe it is. I believe that if our eyes are turned upwards and outwards, if we cut short our ambitions to conquer the solar system, to travel to other stars, to other worlds, we will stagnate, and we will - eventually - perish. A long time from now, certainly, but sooner or later this Earth will not be large enough or fertile enough to house the human race. Sooner or later, we must expand. And without the dream of other worlds, the curiosity about what's out there, the wish - the need - to go further and further out...the human race will lose something precious and important.

It's a terrible thing for those seven astronauts to die in such a manner. It would be even worse if their lives - and the lives of every astronaut who's risked his or her life for the greater good of humankind - were wasted, and that we lay to rest the dream of space travel.  ¶ 19:34