maybe I'm just too grumpy this week - Columbia crash

[dr4b]

I have no words. Happy Chinese New Year. Goodbye, Columbia. And here we were all just thinking 3 days ago about "wow, do you remember being in like 4th grade watching the Challenger explosion?"

(And of course, I do have to admit thinking, "I wonder if this time any of the passengers were CMU graduates.")

Maybe I've just grown so used to news being bad in general that I can't even really get emotionally worked up about this at all. Or maybe after becoming numb on 9/11/2001 when like 5000 people died, I can't even feel anything for 7 people dying. It's sad, I know.

(Yes, every entry in 40 on my friends page was pretty much "holy shit, the Columbia exploded.")

Comments

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

It is just 7 people. Orders of magnatudes more than that dies, unreported, in traffic accidents. The people are trained to know that they are putting themselves in a dangerous situation and it's just amazing that it doesn't happen more often. I personally am more worried about what the sensationalism will do for the space program. It took it a long time to recover from the Challenger explotion and that was when it was still neat that we could go into space on a semiregular basis. The successful shuttle missions have fallen out of the news, so it's hard to know what kind of pr hit this will make.