My poetry class this afternoon was canceled due to a day-long test of the library's alarm system. As my prof said, "I am certain we will get little learning done and suffer greatly." Probably an understatement. Being on the fifth floor of the almost unnavigable library as sirens go off around one most definitely seems enough to make one panic.

Over the weekend I spent a great deal of time watching the coverage of the Columbia disaster. I've seen NASA officials go from shock to defensiveness, and I've seen the media treat the possibility of damaged tiles on the underside of the shuttle being the cause of the burn-up as a foregone conclusion. It seems to me that they pounced upon the easy answer there and are not fully exploring what must have been a complex chain reaction that destroyed the shuttle. At the same time, I'm disturbed by what NASA has been saying in the past few days about the possibility of shuttle repairs in space. While it's understandable that they wouldn't want to attempt a spacewalk to fix broken tiles because of the possibility of breaking more, it seems that by having no alternative method of repair -- or not even having an effective way to evaluate shuttle damage while in space -- the agency is putting its astronauts in an unacceptably risky situation. The way it stands, if several tiles were to fall off the shuttle or be damaged, neither NASA nor its astronauts could do anything about it.

But what's most disturbing about the situation to me is that even if they knew there was damage, they apparently would still send the shuttle -- and its crew -- back down to Earth. Rather than transferring the astronauts to the space station (something they've poured a ton of resources into, perhaps to the neglect of the shuttle program) until another method of getting them home safely could be found, NASA seems to think it's okay to send them on a mission home that would most likely kill them. While I know that all astronauts accept a level of risk by blasting into space, it seems horribly wrong to send them on what amounts to a suicide mission. What does this say about the value of human life? Is it more worthwhile for the agency to ignore such a risk to its astronauts in order to do everything possible to bring back an expensive piece of equipment instead of letting it float unused in space?

It saddens me to think that not that long ago these people were alive, excited about their mission and excited to soon be reunited with the families they'd never see again. It seems like such a great injustice that we can't simply roll back the clock just a few hours to help them somehow -- to at least give them a chance to say goodbye before they end up as charred remains scattered across Texas and Louisiana. Somehow it just seems impossible to not be able to go back just a little bit and stop something that so easily could have been stopped. When death happens so quickly, it's hard to comprehend that in one minute, someone was alive, and in the next, he or she is dead, and there's nothing that can be done to change that.