Quiet Disbelief, and Then Mourning

Waking again to catastrophe, a nation absorbed the horror of Saturday’s space shuttle explosion like soldiers steeped in tragedy, pierced to the heart by images of vapor trails in the Texas sky, but muted in its sorrow.

Still unnerved by the terror attacks of Sept. 11 and bracing for a war in Iraq and the threat of reprisals, Americans lingered uneasily at their televisions as they watched a new disaster unfold. Some pondered the fragility of their heroes, while others were jolted by the realization that even the nation’s most soaring technological feats can go fatally wrong. But many talked of the latest national catastrophe as one more crisis that had to be endured, and one not likely to be the last.

Revelers at a Tet New Year celebration in Garden Grove fell to a hush as an organizer called for a moment of silence for the Columbia’s fallen astronauts. In Cape Canaveral, Fla., more than 500 people gathered at a black granite wall etched with the names of 17 astronauts killed while on a space mission or training for one. Seven wreaths were laid for seven names not yet added.

“Disaster always seems to come in the morning, doesn’t it?” said Jeremy Oney, 23, a Kentucky volunteer firefighter who caught the first bulletin of the shuttle’s disintegration on a 9 a.m. news report.

For Oney and many Americans, the agonizing wait for NASA officials to announce what was already sadly apparent brought back vivid memories of Sept. 11. But this time, there was nothing to do but watch and mourn.

Oney had responded instinctively two years ago after watching the televised terror attacks. He joined with several other volunteers from the east Kentucky city of Flatwoods in an all-night drive to New York, where they worked on the bucket lines in the ruins of the World Trade Center.

But on Saturday morning, Oney had only a few minutes to take in the details of the tragedy in Texas, rushing off to an eight-hour disaster training session before emerging late in the day to learn more.

“You kind of wonder what’s going to happen next,” the firefighter said. “Every time something like this happens, you go, terrorism? And when you hear it’s not, you feel terrible about the tragedy, but at the same time, you’re a little relieved it’s not the start of something worse.”

A similar quiet sadness took root among Tyrone Cooper’s customers at the PX barbershop inside the U.S. Army base at Ft. Bragg, N.C. Most were soldiers who stream in every weekend to “shorten up” for the coming week. Some, Cooper said, are shipping out on deployments this month to the Persian Gulf.

They’ve “been sitting over in front of the TV and watching until it’s their turn,” said Cooper, 26, the son of a career military man. “They’re not talking about it, and I don’t blame ‘em. It’s a hard thing when you gotta die for your country.”

On a subway platform on 125th Street in upper Manhattan, people could not stop talking about the shuttle explosion. When he heard a man standing next to him gasp that the shuttle had crashed, Jonathan Schwartz, 41, reacted with all the worldly aplomb of a native New Yorker.

“You mean the Times Square shuttle?” he asked. When the stranger corrected him, Schwartz immediately assumed the worst. “It was shocking,” he said. “We thought it possibly could be terrorism.”

Even as it quickly became apparent that the shuttle could not have been a terror target, some Americans still had a hard time separating Saturday’s disaster from their unending diet of world turmoil.

Tom Trail, 67, a retired psychiatrist who is now an Idaho legislator, said he switched on his television at 9 a.m. and could not turn it off. The drumbeat of crisis in recent months has made him a habitual viewer, he said, and the midair disintegration of the Columbia on Saturday became one more urgent matter to absorb.

“These have been so routine, you see it on the news,” Trail said. “It becomes commonplace, like watching traffic. Here comes one.”

In downtown Washington, D.C., several hundred tourists and Saturday shoppers drifted almost instinctively to the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum, where a space shuttle exhibit is on permanent display. A screen had been set up to provide telecasts of the Columbia’s descent. Instead, it became an electronic sentinel where stunned visitors stood and passed heartbreaking minutes waiting for word from NASA officials.

Someone left a bouquet of flowers next to a 5-foot-tall model of the shuttle’s mobile launch platform. Kristin Popper, 31, an advertising worker from Atlanta, had just bought a ticket for an afternoon screening of an IMAX shuttle movie when she stumbled on the throng of grim-faced viewers.

“I didn’t know,” she said, haltingly. Her eyes looked pained.

Like many Americans old enough to recall the shuttle Challenger explosion of 1986, Popper immediately compared the two. A child of South Florida, Popper recalled standing “outside between classes and I saw a ball of fire in the air.”

Some who remembered the first shuttle disaster sadly acknowledged that Saturday’s explosion did not stun them like the first one had. “Now it seems like it’s expected for accidents like this to occur,” said Christina Schoen, 25, an assistant department store buyer.

Even catastrophic accidents have taken on the whiff of the routine for some Americans who are no longer aware when shuttles have been launched into orbit.

“I’m like, shocked,” said Jasmine Parker, 15, a high school student who had gone to the Tacoma Mall in downtown Tacoma, Wash., for lunch. “I sort of forgot about the shuttle. I mean, I read about what happened to the other one in school. But you sort of think it would be safe by now.”

But for many Americans who were once caught up in the excitement of the Mercury, Apollo and Gemini missions, thrilling at moon landings and spacewalks, the news from Texas came as a raw wound -- even if it no longer surprised.

“It’s like losing members of your family,” said Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr., a Ventura resident who piloted NASA’s Mercury Faith 7 into space in 1963 and flew the Gemini 5 spacecraft in 1965.

Cooper, 75, a retired Air Force colonel, was one of the legendary crew of astronauts portrayed in the book and film “The Right Stuff.”

Haltingly, he tried to explain what goes through an astronaut’s mind. “When we were up there,” he said, “we tried to think of everything we needed to.”

News of the disaster 200,000 feet up in the atmosphere also gnawed at Gray Nesbitt with all the loneliness of the death of a close friend. Nesbitt sat alone in his SUV in the parking lot at Irvine’s University High School, listening to accounts of the shuttle explosion on the radio. Even as the radio anchors droned on, offering nothing new, Nesbitt felt compelled to hear more while his son warmed up for a lacrosse game.

A retired advertising executive, Nesbitt, 54, once lived in Vero Beach, Fla., and joined his family on frequent trips to watch the shuttles roar into space.

“It’s just a sad day,” he said.