Remembering Columbia

5 years ago on the morning of February 1, 2003 the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up over Texas during it's re-entry, taking with it the lives of the seven crew members on board. We were living in Friendswood Texas at the time...ironically just a block off Nasa Road One and a few miles from Johnson Space Center...home of mission control. When the news broke of the crash we immediately ran outside and sure enough in the distance we could see long white lines stretching across the perfectly clear blue sky. My heart sank and I dropped to my knees right there in the grass. While I was indeed sad for the crew that was lost and their families who were left behind, my initial thoughts were for the children of our country and my own children and I began to cry. The feeling was so familiar...it was as if it had happened just the day before...I was 11 years old sitting in the library of Trails West Elementary watching the launch of the Challenger Shuttle...then disaster...and silence. All the students just sat there not fully realizing what had just happened until we looked around and noticed that all of our teachers were sobbing and hugging each other. The world as I knew it changed forever in that moment...I will never forget that day.

The news of the Columbia crash quickly spread through our community, who it hit especially hard since most of the astronauts and Nasa employees lived in our area near the Space Center. It was fairly common to be in line at the grocery store behind Nasa employees in their signature blue jumpsuits. Later that day we drove down to the Space Center to place flowers on the makeshift memorial that had quickly formed at the entrance. A few days later the kids and I made signs and lined up along with hundreds of fellow well wishers on the sides of Nasa Road One waving our little American flags waiting for the President’s motorcade to pass by. We then headed into Space Center Houston to watch the memorial broadcast on their live feed. In the moments after the memorial as I sat making small talk with other parents, my heart skipped a beat as I watched my kids playing in the giant shuttle cockpit…I was never more proud of this great country and never more proud to be an American.

"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not only because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. " President John F. Kennedy, Houston, Texas, September 12, 1962