“If we die, we want people to accept it. We’re in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.” —

Gus Grissom, who died in the Apollo I fire in 1967.

Columbia was launched three months before I was born, so my entire life has been under the glow of the shuttle program. I was too young to know about Challenger firsthand; it was history. As long as I could remember, the shuttle always went up and always came down.

That is, until Saturday, when I saw NBC break in on the TV in the Madison, Wis., hotel where I was staying and say NASA had lost contact with Columbia.

It is too premature to assign any cause or any blame — although the falling insulation at liftoff is a compelling theory — and right now, it is too premature to reschedule the next flight. Right now, that is.

But in tandem with the mourning and whatever refurbishing may be done to the remaining shuttles, the American public needs to give time to re-evaluating its own thoughts about the space program. Or, to be more precise, lack of them.

Before the shuttle disintegrated, many in the United States were unaware that there was even a shuttle in space at the time. Israel followed astronaut Ilan Ramon diligently, and hundreds of millions in India awaited the return of Kalpana Chawla. But back here, perhaps the most interested were the students whose experiments were on board.

Somewhere in the past 40 years, space travel in this country became … boring. We took “breaking the surly bonds of earth” for granted.

Only when there is a concentrated effort to attract the public, like sending John Glenn up with Discovery in 1998, or when something goes wrong, like having a nearsighted Hubble telescope or a Mars probe disappears because units weren’t converted, is there a spark of any space discussion in the mainstream media or general public.

If you talked to someone in the late 1800s who had just finished reading Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” and told her that not only do we build those fantastic machines and have human beings on the lunar surface, by the end of the 20th century we would be sending crews of seven up into space many times a year, she would be fascinated. Then tell her that we stopped going to the moon because no one cared, and we stopped paying attention to people going there, and she’d wonder what in the future stopped people from being fascinated about the space program.

NASA has become a victim of its own success, compounded by drowning in a sea of bureaucracy. In big-budget movies, NASA helps save the world; in reality, NASA seems to need saving from the world. The only thing worse than being a victim of success would be ending the program that enabled that success in the first place.

To say that sending people into space is too risky, that there’s a chance of not coming back home, is to deny basic hopes and dreams. People participate in that program with lifelong dreams of floating miles above the earth, cognizant of the risks but plunging ahead.

Tell an astronaut not to go into space? You may as well tell a firefighter not to rush into a burning building. You may as well tell a police officer to stop pursuing armed criminals. In all these cases, the belief of perhaps immeasurable benefits triumphing over the threat of grave consequences holds true.

It’s the hopes of the astronauts today and their dreams that need to rub off on the rest of us. We need to remember what made NASA cool in the first place, and why it is still so today; the thrill of exploration should be as awesome to us now as in the 1960s. We, the public as a whole, need to rediscover what people saw in the original seven astronauts who had the right stuff and why today’s astronauts still have that same stuff.

To ignore what they do every day is to ignore something we have in all of us — the impulse to look up and wonder what we can see and where we could go. The very fact that one species on one planet in the universe has the technological know-how to propel itself beyond that planet is something that should never cease to bring awe and pride to the human heart.

One should not expect a people who have ventured out to parts unknown in Conestoga wagons and Winnebagos to have a self-imposed restriction to terra firma.

When — yes, when — we return to space, we will be doing it for purposes large and small, fulfilling dreams ancient and modern. We will do it because we can, and must, to bring glimmers of hope to a world that needs them, to learn more about the wonders of science and life.

We will head into space for the same reason Mallory headed up Mount Everest. Because it’s there.

Jeff Morrison is a junior in journalism and mass communication and political science from Traer. He is the wire editor of the Daily.