It has been a month and a half since the space shuttle Columbia plunged to Earth in a fireball. It was a painful reminder that we can’t control everything about human spaceflight. It may turn out that no company or person is to blame for this terrible accident, but that hasn’t stopped the fingerpointing among contractors and posturing among members of Congress and the Senate. I hope that we figure out what happened and I hope that we retain our understanding that these things happen and that space is not a benign environment.

In 1986 we watched as the second big tragedy of American spaceflight occurred — the loss of the Challenger. I was at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, watching the launch in Von Karman auditorium along with dozens of Voyager mission scientists and science writers who had gathered for the final press conference of the Voyager 2/Uranus encounter.

It was a searing tragedy, perhaps all the more spectacular because our space program hadn’t been touched by death since the Apollo 1 disaster in 1967.

There have been other losses throughout the decades of our exploration of space. Of course the Russians have lost cosmonauts — learning along with us the price we pay to rise above our planet and look to the stars. What comforts me is that we continue to strive outward from our planet. Indeed, sometimes I think that space exploration is our best and brightest hope for the future of the human race. The tragedies of the past set the bar higher for us in the future — but there’s no doubt we learn from them and keep on going.

So, with that, I salute the space heroes who have fallen during our first tentative steps outward. Sure there’s danger out there. But it’s inherent in any new endeavor. I believe that every one of our lost astronauts and cosmonauts would want us to keep the faith in space exploration as a lasting monument to the price they paid to give humanity a chance to leap for the stars.