The Jerusalem Report Magazine: Columnists : Columnists Article

Click for Contents

Click here to subscribe to The Jerusalem Report

P.O. Box 1805,Jerusalem 91017
Tel. 972-2-531-5440,
Fax: 972-2-537-9489
Advertising Fax:
972-2-531-5425,
Email Editorial: [email protected]
Subscriptions: [email protected]
Web site: http://www.jrep.com

David Horovitz: Ilan Ramonï¿½s Vital Perspective
David Horovitz

At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the doomed space shuttle Columbia lifted off on January 16, forklifts and cranes are putting in place the final panels of a large outdoor memorial to the seven crew members, including Israelï¿½s first astronaut, Ilan Ramon. Within a month, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board is to issue its report into the February 1 tragedy. It seems certain that the findings will confirm published reports that a 1.67-lb. piece of ice-preventing foam detached, on liftoff, from the shuttleï¿½s external fuel tank and struck Columbiaï¿½s left wing, so damaging the shuttleï¿½s protective panels as to render it fatally vulnerable to the searing heat of reentry.

Less certain are the repercussions of the disaster and the investigation. NASA has tentatively scheduled the next launch of a shuttle, the Atlantis, for March 2004. But officials acknowledge the date is meaningless. After the Challenger disaster, in 1986, the shuttle did not fly again for two and a half years, and there is no telling how long the wait may be this time. Everything hinges not only on the improvements and new safety precautions that will be ordered in the wake of the boardï¿½s report, but also on a wider debate over the future of the entire program. America is torn over spending billions of dollars, and risking more disasters, on manned missions to parts of space where it has long been established that there is no life or prospect of it.

In the pages of the local Orlando Sentinel, for instance, readers recently debated the merits of further missions, with every argument about the benefits for mankind, as ingenuity takes technology past previous boundaries, countered by calls for the reallocation of the precious NASA funding to confront all manner of earthly crises and challenges.

The claim that the space programï¿½s technological spin-offs have so enhanced our lives as to justify its maintenance is less than overwhelming. More persuasive is the argument that mankind is obliged to marshal the intelligence with which we have been bestowed in order to explore the universe in which we live.

And then there is Ramonï¿½s observation, and his plea, in a letter to Israelï¿½s President Moshe Katsav on January 26. "We are all working this mission for the benefit of all mankind, and from space our world looks as one unity with no borders," Ramon wrote. "So let me call from up here in space -- letï¿½s work our way for peace and better life for everyone on Earth."

Ramon was not the first astronaut to be dazzled, from that unique perspective, by the banal fact that our planet, the only place we know we can survive in the vast universe, was created without borders -- to realize anew how humankind holds its common fate in its own hands, and register what a hash we have been making of it so far; how close we have come, in our short-sighted, egotistical wars, to wiping out humanity altogether; and how, despite such near misses, we still boneheadedly search for more efficient means to kill each other off.

Similar thoughts had occurred to many of Ramonï¿½s predecessors. In the visitorsï¿½ complex at the Kennedy center, a few miles from Columbiaï¿½s launch pad, film clips from past Apollo and shuttle missions show several American astronauts first marveling at the sight of our tiny, precious Earth, and then reflecting on the fact that, from up there, the conflicts and wars they have left behind seem so outrageously dangerous, and so supremely petty. For Ramon, the former fighter pilot, that higher view must have been particularly poignant.

It is the habit of our Prime Minister to invite and escort his most esteemed overseas guests, and particularly those who have not been to the region before or often, on a helicopter tour of our narrow slice of Middle Eastern territory, the better to illustrate Israelï¿½s potential territorial vulnerability. Choppers can cover the country north to south in under two hours, west to east in much less. From such a vantage point, it is impossible to ignore how vast are the Arab lands stretching far beyond every horizon. Impossible not to register how short the distance between our international airport and the Palestinian population centers, and how easy it would be to take down an airliner with a missile fired from the West Bank.

The helicopter tours have a powerful impact, and rightly so. But (to indulge in a little fanciful thinking) would that Sharon, his guests, indeed all those world leaders whose actions shape our destiny -- and most especially those who have yet to realize the indefensibility of spilling blood in their narrow causes -- could fly to yet more elevated a vantage point, and themselves take visitorsï¿½ seats in future missions to space. Together, they could look down on our fragile planet, register its vulnerability, and resolve to act in common cause to preserve it.

Everyone at Kennedy is, obviously, adamant that the shuttle program must go on. Its foremost imperative is to service and develop the International Space Station, itself a border-surmounting long-duration joint research project of 16 nations, whose key players are the U.S. and Russia -- once bitter space rivals enjoying a partnership that has healthily become routine.

In the "biggest space store in the world" at Kennedy, memorabilia from Ramonï¿½s mission, STS-107, have neither been removed from the shelves nor given tasteless prominence. The sew-on patches and metal "crew emblem" coins hang in unremarked numerical place alongside those of all other flights, the coin unusual only for the stark legend on the packaging: "After a successful 16-day scientific mission, Columbia was lost during reentry, February 1, 2003." It is not that NASA wants to play down the tragedy; anything but. Astronauts and other staffers at the Center discuss it endlessly, openly, sorrowfully. But they want to move on, once it is safe to do so.

And we should support them. For we foolishly warring humans urgently need to foster and absorb that vital sense of perspective, about the fragility of life here on Earth, which has seemed so obvious to Ilan Ramon and others who look down upon us from out there in space.