But Because They Are Hard

By now, most everybody has heard that the SpaceX tried to launch the Falcon 9 and Dragon cargo capsule on a resupply mission to the International Space Station and that the booster blew up just over 2 minutes into flight. The details are still coming in, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing more reports with information as soon as the launch crew can assemble and understand them.

I’m not going to supply much commentary about what actually happened; that’s what the launch experts will do. It’s certainly a sad day, particularly for the folks at SpaceX and NASA, but also for a group of students whose Cubesat experiment was on its second try (their first one was destroyed in last October’s Orbital Sciences Mission disaster). There were other experiments and pieces of equipment aboard, and those are now a total loss.

I’ve seen a lot of people commenting on social media now, making unfounded accusations, making statements that belie a lack of understanding of just how tough it is to launch things into space and how SpaceX and NASA and others handle the  news of these events. Belligerence doesn’t uncover facts. Patient, scientific investigation will tell us the story. For the folks who want to rant and rave, think about this: if it happened to YOU and your company, would you want people saying about YOU what YOU have said about this mishap today? Think a little before you post rantings, people.

Apparently, people also don’t read history too much. Everybody who has ever tried to launch something has faced failures. Most of the time, those failures resulted in the loss of the craft, but they also taught us something about the complexity of launch.  A few times, we’ve lost people in those failures, and those disasters taught us a deeper lesson about exploration and the human will to expand our horizons and how gawdawful it is when lives full of promise are lost in the attempt to do something big and important.

At least today, no one’s life was lost. The mission hardware is a loss, but the lessons learned will be used to pick ourselves up and try again. If you don’t believe me, do some reading about the early days of the American space program. Put yourself in the boots of the Russians, who have had their share of problems; or in the place of the Arianespace people, who also know the bitter taste of launch failure, but have gone on to more success. Everyone who launches faces failure, while hoping for success.

In short, as I say in the headline, and echoing the words of the late President John F. Kennedy, who spoke them while I was still a tiny child:  “We do these things… not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”  And, launching is hard. No matter how many times I’ve watched a launch (and I’ve seen a LOT of them), the knowledge that something can go wrong is never far from our minds. A lot of things go right, and when they do, we get amazing knowledge about ourselves, our planet, our solar system, our galaxy, and our universe. We didn’t lose the universe today and we didn’t lose ourselves. A launch vehicle failed. But, another one will take its place, and we’ll move on and upwards.