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Tant: Sacrifices are necessary in soaring the heavens

Posted: Saturday, February 08, 2003

   Hurtling back from the threshold of space, things went suddenly and horribly wrong aboard the speeding rocketplane. Out of control and falling fast, the spaceship crashed into the California-desert, killing its pilot, Air Force Major Michael Adams who was frantically trying to make a landing at that citadel of ''the right stuff'' Edwards Air Force Base. It was Nov. 15, 1967 and the spaceship was the powerful X-15 rocketplane.




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Major Adams had just jockeyed his fuming space steed to a dizzying altitude of 50 miles when he suffered what a NASA spokesman at the time called ''some sort of control malfunction'' after re-entering the atmosphere of Planet Earth. Adams' spaceflight fatality was a grim precursor to last week's reentry disaster aboard Space Shuttle Columbia that brought fiery death to its crew of seven astronauts.

   The road to the stars is potholed with adversity. Over a century ago, between the years 1891 and 1896, a German aeronautical pioneer named Otto Lilienthal made the first manned glider flights in cloth and wood contraptions that resembled today's hang gliders. His work in aviation would later inspire two Ohio bicycle mechanics named Wilbur and Orville Wright, who dreamed of true powered flight aboard an airplane. Lilienthal never lived to see the dreams of the Wright Brothers come true above the sands of Kitty Hawk. He died in the crash of one of his gliders at the age of 48. As horrified onlookers rushed to his aid, Lilienthal sighed his last words: ''Sacrifices must be made.''

   Sacrifices have been made for decades as brave men and women have ''pushed the envelope'' by climbing ever higher and flying ever faster in a variety of strange craft built to cruise the cosmic ocean. In 1953, test pilot Skip Ziegler was killed in an explosion aboard the sleek, swept-winged X-2 rocketplane. Three years later, flier Mel Apt died when his X-2 careened out of control after a record-setting Mach 3 speed run over the California desert. Iven Kincheloe, the granddaddy of all test pilots, coaxed his temperamental X-2 to an altitude of 26 miles in 1956 - a record that held for years - but later died in the crash of a fast and furious F-104 jet fighter.

   On May 4, 1961, Navy Commander Malcolm Ross and Lt. Commander Victor Prather returned to Earth after a balloon-borne research flight to a record altitude of more than 21 miles. After their high flying craft splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico, Ross was hoisted aboard a recovery helicopter but Prather drowned at the moment of his triumph. The sacrifice of aeronaut Victor Prather was all but forgotten the very next day when astronaut Alan Shepard roared aloft from Cape Canaveral on a 15-minute rocket ride that made him America's first man in space.

   1967 was a year of sacrifice for space fliers in both America and Russia. In addition to the loss of test pilot Adams after a botched reentry in his X-15 rocketplane, America lost astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee in a launch pad fire that took their lives as they were testing their Apollo spacecraft. Russia lost cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov when the parachute failed on his Soyuz spaceship. Four years later, in 1971, three more Russian cosmonauts would die in space when a faulty valve let the air out of their craft as they were returning to Earth after a three-week stay aboard the Salyut space station.

   Not until 1986 would space exploration claim more lives when the seven-person crew of space shuttle Challenger died in an explosion in the azure skies above Cape Canaveral. When they journeyed to the moon in 1971, Apollo astronauts Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell left on the lunar landscape a memorial plaque and a small replica of a fallen astronaut.

   The tribute to the sacrifice of space flight is a fitting memorial on the stark surface of Planet Earth's companion. More sacrifices will be made as men and women explore the endless frontier of space, but as writer Eden Phillpots so sagely said, ''The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.''





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