Falling from the sky
Friday night was a night for celebration. We signed our names to 273 pieces of paper, officially declaring ourselves Florida homeowners. My wife, being the amazing person she is, had managed to strike up a friendship with the people from whom we rented our house for two months before closing on it Friday. The four of us went to a local fondue restaurant to celebrate. Bottles of wine were available. That's pretty much all that needs to be said about that.

Then, a little after 9 in the morning, the phone rang. I was still groggy; I handed the phone over to The Wife, as I was fully not intending to speak to anyone for probably the rest of the day. The Wife answers, says, "Yeah, you can talk to him, but he's not feeling very well." She hands the phone back to me. On the other end was a voice I usually hear over my right shoulder at work, not from the phone a little after 9 on Saturday morning. Being the great co-worker that she is, she led off with about 30 seconds of apology for being in my phone at that hour, then she said: "The shuttle blew up over Dallas."

Holy shit.

The space shuttle usually lands about 40 miles, as the crow flies, from our new home. At that hour, I should have been awakened by a sonic boom, not by the voice of a co-worker. Instead, at that hour, folks in East Texas were seeing pieces of the United States' space program falling in their fields.

So I had to shake off the revelry and organize a staff. I'm going to say in this forum I didn't do it very well; I felt like I was running in mud all day, not because of the hangover, but largely because of my inability to get my mind around the story. It had been a long week; had I not taken Friday off, Saturday would have been my seventh really long day in a row. We put out an 8-page extra edition, then followed that with 24 pages of stuff on top of our regular paper. I guess it turned out OK. It's a little after 11 a.m., and I haven't looked at it yet for anything other than a cursory glance.

Over at RER, Otis asks why it's different on Feb. 1, 2003, than it was on Jan. 28, 1986, when we all watched Challenger blew up. It's hard to quantify exactly how it's different, but without question, it is.

The Challenger explosion still ranks as the news event to which I had the strongest emotional reaction -- even stronger than on Sept. 11, 2001. I was a senior in high school, cutting my third-hour class to watch the launch on TV in the school library. I was something of a space geek at the time. On the Challenger crew was Christa McAuliffe, a teacher, a normal woman -- not a space geek -- who was going to open the door to space travel to the masses. When it blew up, I cried like a baby. I cried for Mrs. McAuliffe's students, who watched their teacher die on national TV. I cried because I thought that was the end of our space program. I cried because it scared me. I choke up now even as I type this.

Eleven years later, I was living in Florida. The Wife and I took the Old Daughter, then 2, to see a night space shuttle launch. She didn't care that much, to be honest. It's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. The night sky turns blue as the engines fire, and you feel the noise more than you actually hear it. The space shuttle is an amazing testament to the capabilities of the human mind and the human hands to harness power and use that power to explore things way beyond the boundaries of civilization.

It's also probably the most dangerous mode of travel ever invented. It's a wonder it took 22 years of space shuttle flights for an accident like Saturday's to happen. Every launch damages the vehicle in some small way. Every landing takes the vehicle to the edge of its physical limits. This time, it crossed the line.

Back to Otis' original question: Why is it different?

Start with a major news event occurring on a Saturday morning. One of my staffers, who was out of town, responded to my morning message at about 8 p.m. She told me she hadn't even heard about the shuttle until a few hours before she called.

Routine shuttle missions really don't get a lot of coverage outside of Houston and Central Florida. The Israeli astronaut being a part of this mission took it slightly beyond the routine, but only slightly.

But most importantly: After having experienced a day where nearly 3,000 people were killed just because they went to work, it's hard for us to get fired up about seven people who voluntarily strapped themselves in to the most dangerous form of transportation available.

It reminded me of my reaction to the crash of American Flight 587 in November 2001. As soon as we can cross "act of terrorism" off the list of causes, for some reason, that makes everything OK.

And that's probably what I hate most about the world in which I live.