There Is No Cat - Oh no! Not again!

The alternative to flowers!

Saturday, February 1, 2003

Oh no! Not again!

What a shame. The breakup of the Shuttle Columbia this morning isn't quite as much of a shock as Challenger, but it's still a terrible, terrible thing. I found out about it from a post on Curious Frog, but you can probably read about it on damned near every web site in the world by now.

I've basically followed the space program my entire life. Men landed on the moon for the first time ten days before my sixth birthday. The first moon buggy, which went up with Apollo 15, was used for the first time on my birthday a couple of years later. I've always found space flight fascinating, as have many people my age. There was something magical about it when I was a kid, and I've certainly kept up my interest since then.

When Challenger exploded in 1986, I was living in State College, Pennsylvania, in the year after I graduated from college. My housemate woke me that morning to tell me what had happened. As I shook the sleep from my eyes, my first reaction was "but that's not supposed to happen. The space shuttle can't explode." This time, I suppose it was more "oh no, not again...."

There's not much to add, I suppose. I found it interesting that the debris trail from the shuttle apparently showed up on weather radar this morning. If nothing else is clear, it's that space flight is still the dangerous, daring adventure that so captivated me 30-plus years ago.

Posted at 2:00 PM

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What do you mean there is no cat?

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

- Albert Einstein, explaining radio