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Epilogue T wenty-four times the shuttles had launched. Twenty-four times they had returned safely to Earth. By the twenty-fifth shuttle mission successful launches had come to seem routine, to the American public at least. Thus, on 28 January 1986, when the space shuttle Challenger rose from an ice-encrusted Cape Canaveral into the Florida sky, the commercial television networks were busy with other things.1 But there were people watching, mostly on CNN or NASA TV, and many of them were children sitting in their schools, for in addition to its professional astronaut crew, Challenger was carrying Christa McAuliffe, a teacher from Concord, New Hampshire. The previous year, McAuliffe had been selected as the winner of NASA’s Teacher In Space Program, and in the course of the mission she was scheduled to conduct educational experiments and also to deliver two lessons on the subject of spaceflight for broadcast live to the nation’s public schools.2 McAuliffe was the first private US citizen to travel on a NASA mission. It seemed likely that others would follow her soon. The agency had already announced its intention to carry a journalist on a future shuttle flight.3 In the office of Peggy Noonan, a White House speechwriter, the television was on and tuned to CNN. But Noonan, who was in the middle of a phone conversation, was not watching when, seventy-three seconds after lift-off, the screen showed the rising shuttle abruptly bloom and disintegrate. An assistant rushed in with the news. Viewing the unfolding coverage, Noonan quickly realized that the crew were lost and that President Reagan would have to talk to the nation. She began drafting his remarks, which would draw on notes from a conversation between Reagan and a group of network news an- Epilogue 165 chors an hour or so after the tragedy occurred. There were a few other significant contributions and revisions before Reagan delivered the speech from the Oval Office at five o’clock that evening, but not nearly as many as for most presidential addresses. The closing passage of the speech, with only minor editing changes, survived intact from Noonan’s original draft: “The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved good-bye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”4 Noonan does not explain how she came to include the quotations from “High Flight” in the address; she only recalls her intuition at the time that Reagan would know the poem: “It was precisely the kind of poem he would have known, from the days when everyone knew poems and poets were famous , everyone knew Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. It had been popular during the war.” She was right. Reagan told her later that the poem had been inscribed on a plaque outside his daughter’s school. She also learned from a Hollywood press agent that Laurence Olivier had read “High Flight” at the funeral of Tyrone Power, who, like John Gillespie Magee, had served as a pilot during the Second World War.5 Perhaps it had always been thus: the melancholic knowledge of Magee’s own early death and a growing association with mournful experience as a result of its recitation at the funerals of aviators combined to convert a poem that abounded with the joys of life into a kind of requiem, with its exultant closing line now read as a synonym for death. Still, until the Challenger disaster the poem seems to have retained its original optimistic meaning for the pioneers of spaceflight, expressing a hope of transcendence implicit in the experience of spaceflight itself, not a consolation for times when a mission went fatefully wrong. When Pat Collins typed Magee’s verse onto a small card for inclusion in her husband’s personal-preference kit and when Jim Irwin appropriated “High Flight” as the name of his ministry, they had no intention of evoking the grave.6 “We’re still pioneers,” Reagan assured the nation. “We’ll continue our quest in space.” But by the end of his address, even before inquiries into the disaster revealed serious deficiencies in the design of the shuttle and in the decision-making process that allowed Challenger’s launch that icy morning, something had changed.7 Into the mid-1980s...

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