"Hon, better come in here and look at this." CNN is running footage of the takeoff and analysts are giving their opinions, and suddenly the clever jokes for this morning's blog look cheap and petty—which they usually are anyway, but now I can see it more clearly. So we scrap the lineup of stories and think about the depth of this instead. You can visit any news site you like for the bios of the astronauts we've lost:

Pilot William McCool, Commander Rick Husband, Mission Specialists Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark and David Brown, Payload Commander Michael Anderson, and Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon.

There are a lot of opinions as to what constitutes the essential difference between human beings and other animals, but I tend to agree with those who hold that it's our meta-consciousness—that we are aware that we're aware—that earns us the "sapiens" label. We've tried different ways to deal with this aspect of our species. Some tribes and societies have found value in reflecting and philosophizing; science isn't an imperative, it's a choice we make among many other options. Consider the way that our relationship with fundamentalist Islamicism (and fundamentalist religion in general) is complicated by the non-scientific biases underpinning those philosophies and their conflict with a secular definition of humanity and the meaning of the Enlightenment.

Stephen Jay Gould's non-overlapping magisteria perspective argues against the idea that one of those paths to our ultimate destiny negates the other. Most of us don't—or can't—orient to a single end of the Internal/External continuum, rather, we pursue both routes to knowledge simultaneously. Yet it's a given that empirical understanding is costly, and many of us die in the attempt to gain it. While spectacular, a failed space mission only underscores the deaths of medical researchers, volcanologists, marine scientists, anthropologists, and those from every other branch of knowledge whose risks, while manageable, are never fully controlled.

We owe our gradually expanding awareness of our universe and ourselves to that spirit of discovery that senses something wonderful around the next bend, that knows there's something there worth finding if we're willing to wager our lives against the unknown.

2:27:38 PM