Jolted from a shared wonder in spaceflight

Even after the ominous first announcements, it seemed so innocent and clean flashing through the morning sky on our television screens, a streamer of white heralding one more arrival from space.

Maybe we've seen so many fictional encounters in space that we can't quickly absorb or accept the terrible spectacle of death in the heavens when it is soundless and comes to us masked as a swift and graceful plume of smoke splitting the blue sky above Texas.

Space is still a fantasy world for most of us. Its heroes are not warriors or gladiators confronting an enemy in arenas of violence. Space is full of wonder and mystery. It unites our imaginations with our longing to reach for and to find something beyond us.

The instant and global attention that today's television brings to a flight to the moon or to an orbiting safe house in space creates audiences into the billions of people. Yet it remains a personal odyssey for many who watch. The canvas of that journey is huge, the universe itself. Because it is, the event sweeps us for a few moments or a few hours into an experience that dissolves the boundaries of everyday life. It lets us soar and revel in a kind of psychic weightlessness in which we can frolic with the astronauts. It is exhilarating and it seems harmless.

It is not harmless for the men and women who have become our escorts. But the technology of rocketry and spaceflight has advanced so far and its success rate is so remarkable that the illusions of the space journey have become part of the spectacle.

It will all end happily on a runway in Florida, we tell ourselves.

On Saturday morning, nearly 40 miles above the earth, the illusion broke once more, 17 years removed - almost to the day - from the awful fireball in the sky that ended the flight of the space shuttle Challenger.

The scientists, the engineers, and the astronauts are constantly aware, of course, of the hazards. And the viewing public is reminded of it at each step of the countdowns, despite the terse professionalism of those disembodied voices reciting the familiar litanies and dialogue between Mission Control and the shuttle commander.

Why, then, is the pain and devastation we feel so complete and stunning, so uniquely personal, when the spaceship falls in pieces before our eyes? We see grief and tragedy on our screens almost every day. We respond to it with anger or compassion or futility. On Sept. 11, 2001, the death and destruction from an attack on the United States stirred Americans from sorrow to retaliation and now toward war.

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