It was a bright, sunny late January day in St. Louis with a hint of warmth as I recall. I was sitting at my desk signing the 100 or so checks that had to go out at the end of the month when my wife called. All she could say was “Oh! Those poor kids.” She was referring to the Challenger disaster and the fact that Christa McCauliffe, the first real civilian to go into space and a teacher from a small school in New Hampshire, was killed in full view of her students on national TV.

Living in an apartment literally behind the office complex where I worked, it took me less than a minute to sprint home. For the rest of the day – a day in retrospect much like 9/11 – I was glued to the TV as history unfolded before my eyes. Even 20 years later I have a hard time trying to put my emotions into context. I was sorry for the astronauts of course. But much more than that, I realized that the tragedy signaled the end of the space age as we had come to know it.

By 1986 it had become apparent that NASA had oversold the Shuttle. Thinking back that day to April of 1981 when I snuck out of work and went to the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill to sit in the bar and watch the launch of the very first shuttle, I tried to recapture the feeling of watching the machine as it rose majestically into the air. “Go! Go! Go!” Everyone in the crowded bar was screaming at the top of their lungs as the excitement of the day made me think that I was witnessing a gigantic step forward on mankind’s road to the stars.

It wasn’t to be. Instead, the Shuttle proved to be something of a lemon, a multi billion dollar space truck that the government had to pay corporations to use by charging a pittance for satellite launching compared to what it actually cost the government to launch and maintain. We knew this by January 28, 1986. What we didn’t know and didn’t find out until the Presidential Commission on the disaster returned its damning findings was that NASA had ossified into a glacial bureaucracy that no amount of tinkering could fix because the problems were spiritual, not systemic.

NASA had stopped listening to the music, the siren song coming from the stars. Their thoughts and energies were earthbound. They had lost the “can-do” spirit of the go-go 60’s and become just another incompetent federal bureaucracy.

Dr. Pat Santay was flight surgeon to the Challenger crew and obviously has some poignant, gripping memories from that day. I urge you to read this post in its entirety. Her introduction especially caught my eye:

NASA has evolved into a culture that does not tolerate criticism well. It is a place where being a “team player” means shutting up and doing what you are told, or else you will be marginalized and your career finished. That is not the sort of place where innovation—or safety—thrive.

I still believe that space exploration and colonization is the destiny of humanity and that one day our decendants will fly from star to star the way we drive from city to city. I no longer imagine them flying in NASA spacecraft, however. The astronauts of Challenger and Columbia are some of the pioneers that slowly but surely bring us closer to that dream. To all of them I say, the dream is alive and well…but that NASA stopped dreaming a while back and is now just semi-comatose. We will make it into outer space to explore strange, new worlds; to seek out new civilizations and go where noone has gone before—but it will be through the courage of private citizens whose boldness is not limited by a risk-adverse and earth-bound government bureaucracy. I personally look to them to bring the future.

It is not cheap going into space. It costs NASA around $1,500 per pound to put a man into space and keep him alive. Before the kind of future Pat is talking about becomes a reality, that number is going to have to be sliced by 90%. And the corporations that can do it are probably already in existence.

NASA’s current plans call for returning to the moon by 2018. To my mind,, it’s an even money bet to see whether a commercial enterprise beats the government back there or not. Given NASA’s recent track record with making deadlines and having projects come in under budget, I suspect that unless the issue is pressed, NASA would lose that bet.

The American space program actually defined this country for a while. No longer. If nothing else, the fact that NASA has been staffed by small men with small dreams has turned a once proud agency and showcase for US achievement into a shell of its former self. I’m with the Doc; it’s time to look elsewhere for those who dream big dreams and have the drive and determination to make them come true.

A little bit of all of us died that horrible day 20 years ago. But soon…very soon, we may start hearing the music again.