The 28th

A lot of you who read this blog presently have probably been following me for less than a year. January 28th is not one of my favorite days. One is a reason shared by this country, one is a reason shared in my family. All of which I’ve spoken about before on this blog over the years, so I will be referring to previous entries here.

Most of you my age or thereabouts know what happened on January 28, 1986. On a rare cold midday in Florida, Space Shuttle Challenger was launched with a crew of seven, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Slightly past a minute later, a rupture in the orange external fuel tank caused its explosion along with that of Challenger. The crew cabin of the shuttle detached from the rest of the vehicle, and if the astronauts were not killed by the sudden loss of air pressure after the explosion by not instantly finding emergency oxygen masks, the impact into the Atlantic Ocean (reportedly at 200 G’s) likely did.

The real tragedy of it all was that one man, Roger Boisjoly, a mechanical engineer for Morton Thiokol, tried to warn NASA that the O-rings on the bottom of the soild rocket boosters his employers created would not work in such extremely cold (for Florida) weather conditions. That day, NASA wouldn’t heed a review of new evidence for whatever reasons they had, and tragically went ahead with the launch anyway. I always felt bad for Boisjoly, as NASA didn’t treat him kindly nor with any sort of public apology. He was a man who was right at the wrong time, facing a bureaucracy convinced it could do no wrong.

It was the one event when I was in high school that you remember where you were when it happened, and in the house I grew up in, only the 1983 Americas Cup (where the Aussies stunned the Americans to end their 132 year reign as the top yachtsmen in the world) comes close in terms of an event that carried such gloom, and that event was a well distant second.

Little did I know that five years to that very day, I’d lose my dad to cancer.

Christmas time, either 1972 or 1973.

I’ve talked about this back in 2012 and 2014. Tomorrow (maybe Friday if predicted rain continues to hang around), I will once again be paying him a visit at Serenity Gardens over in Largo. All I have to say for now is that cancer sucks, and it always has. Maybe someday in my lifetime there will be a cure for it, and I hope for everyone in the human race that the day cancer is cured for all time will come soon.

Talking about it is how I cope, so thanks for reading. Hope I’m not depressing you too much, but what’s the point of a personal blog if you can’t share what makes a person tick?

(Note: Originally when I posted this entry on January 28th, I erroneously said that one of the solid rocket boosters hit the external tank, causing it and the shuttle to explode. On February 1st, I read an article on Space.com that correctly points out that the two SRB’s remained intact after the explosion, thus the need to have to auto-destruct each of them, and I thus made the necessary corrections.)

Cancer Sucks

Another one of my uncles passed away last Tuesday.

It had been somewhat expected for the last few weeks, as once cancer has you, it sadly doesn’t let you go. Even more unfortunately, I could not make the pilgrimage to North Carolina to say my farewells as I had hoped, but that’s another issue. Other immediate family members did get to see him that one final time. I did not get such a chance, which I blame myself for.

Cancer kills too many of us, no matter where we come from, no matter what financial standing we aspire to in life. I find it a bit cruel that we are the only country to have successfully landed on the Moon, but yet we haven’t found a cure for cancer. It took my father in 1991, and it has now taken another member of the family this year.

We spend so much time on breast cancer awareness for women, and it is a good cause worth mentioning and/or remembering. I just wish we (as a society) openly asked the question of ourselves: why has breast cancer cases gone up so significantly in the past 30 years? Is it the air we breathe? What we eat? What we drink?

The “why” has become some sort of secret, some riddle. It shouldn’t be. Each of us should be asking at least question beginning with a “why” every day. Can you tell I love questions that start with that word?

As for my uncle, he has passed into the kingdom of heaven, up there with my father and other family members. I wish him a safe journey to his reward, and look forward to seeing him again when my time comes, whenever that is.