NASA Day of Remembrance 2023

The crew of Columbia, whose comingled remains are buried beneath the Columbia monument at Arlington National Cemetery.

I work for NASA, and my sister was Astronaut Janice Voss. This is the week we remember the Apollo 1 fire (January 27, 1967) that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffe; the break up of Challenger engulfed in flames (January 28, 1986) that killed Dick Scobee, Ron McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Judy Resnik, Mike Smith, and Greg Jarvis; and Columbia burning up on re-entry (February 1, 2003) killing Willie McCool, Rick Husband, Ilan Ramon, Laurel Clark, Mike Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, and Dave Brown.

Having spent some time with astronauts and their families over the last few days, I can tell you some of what the family feels. We are so proud of Janice’s accomplishments, her career, and her association with NASA. The representative from the Israeli Embassy who attended the NASA Day of Remembrance at Arlington Cemetery Thursday, Jan. 26, said Ilan Ramon and his family are upheld as heroes in Israel.

Flowers are laid at the Columbia memorial at Arlington National Cemetery for NASA’s Day of Remembrance January 26, 2023.

Arlington Cemetery is a place of graves marking lives lived for something larger than the self. I found it a comforting pilgrimage since 2010 during NASA Days of Remembrance at the end of January when my sister was struggling with and later succumbed to breast cancer.

She lived her dream, and she lived a life she loved. It's all victory.

Janice flew on the Space Shuttle five times, one of the most flown astronauts of her era. On days like this, I think of the horror of how the crews we remember died. But I never thought about the horror of the deaths of the Challenger crew during Janice’s launches. One launch, I was able to be in the press crew to wave her off as she got into the van to go to the launch pad. When she spied me, she broke out in a wide smile, her excitement barely contained. I had the thought that if this should be our last moment, it was a good moment. And then I let that thought go.

Of all the ways one can die, dying in service to a lofty ideal is surely one of the most hallowed. Even the indirect deaths—the astronauts who died in T-38 jets during training, my sister’s cancer—are part of the cadre of commitment and contribution that makes up the space endeavor.

The NASA astronauts currently leading NASA used this year’s Day of Remembrance as a week of remembrance focused on safety. NASA Administrator Senator Bill Nelson flew on the Space Shuttle flight before Challenger. His flight landed 10 days before Challenger exploded at launch. Bob Cabana, Associate Administrator, former Center Director of the Kennedy Space Center after his flights was in charge of crew operations. He had driven with many crews to the launch pad. He drove with the Columbia crew to the pad. He and former Shuttle Commander Pam Melroy were waiting on the landing strip at KSC for Columbia, but never got to hear that double sonic boom. These events are personal to them, as it is to many at NASA. Pam Melroy’s message was, “It can happen to you.” You don’t expect disaster to strike, but it can. Don’t get complacent about asking questions and making sure the proper things are considered. Speak up. In some sense it would have been possible to prevent the disasters, which is not to say that, at the time, it was obvious.

The Wall Street Journal today published a piece about one of the Morton-Thiokol engineers that tried to stop the launch of Challenger. Having worked for Thiokol before Morton bought it, I knew some of the guys involved. I dated the man in charge of transporting the shuttle solid rocket boosters to Florida, Bob Tydeck. He had some involvement with Allan McDonald’s book, “Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster.”

Making the call is hard. What’s easy is 20/20 hindsight. Launching is never that cut and dry. NASA has sensors on everything and monitors myriad systems going into a launch, looking for any anomalies. My sister launched on STS-83, the shuttle flight that was aborted after three days for performance irregularity on one of the three fuel cells. (The fuel cells generate energy from the same chemistry that powers the shuttle main engines, so the problem was potentially explosive.) The cell was reading outside the norm for the whole countdown up until shortly before launch. Shortly after launch, it continued the trend right out of the normal range again. Even after a successful launch, admittedly one of the most dangerous parts of the mission, the ground crew is constantly monitoring systems for problems that come up and their solutions. There are close calls that never make it into public stories. In the last month and a half, we’ve seen a micrometeorite (not even space debris, which we know is a problem) cripple the Soyuz docked to the International Space Station. NASA has been surprised by how often the Webb Space Telescope is hit by micrometeorites—the kind of unknown unknowns that space is full of. (Not all surprises are bad: the dust storms on Mars, as it turned out, cleaned dust off the rover solar panels and gave years of unanticipated life to Opportunity.)

NASA has what it calls “in-family risks” and “out-of-family” risks. Things that look like a potential problem but have happened before and didn’t kill anyone, and things they haven’t seen before. Foam strikes coming off the external propellant tank were a known “in-family risk.” The burn-through of the O-rings on Challenger had happened before. This is by way of saying that there is a constant balancing act in evaluating the seriousness of known and unknown risks against a judgment call of whether that risk is serious enough to cancel a shuttle launch. The quote comes to mind about, "A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." (John Shedd) We wouldn’t fly if we tried to be completely safe.

The truth is this. Space travel is a risky business. Traveling, working, and living in an environment as hostile to life as space is dangerous. The people who go there have courage and capability. They know the risks, and they take the chances for all of humanity.

With camera and cable in hand, Astronaut Janice Voss floats through a portal into the SpaceHab on Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-57 in 1993.