美英报刊阅读教程Lesson 34 课文

Lesson 34 Out of the Blue

On a picture-perfect Texas morning, the shuttle Columbia was heading home when tragedy struck, leaving America and the world wondering what went wrong-and honoring the lives of seven brave astronauts.

By Evan Thomas

1) Tony Beasley, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, got up early, along with his wife and mother-in-law, to watch the space shuttle fly overhead. It was a little after 5:45 a.m., California time, 7:45 a.m. at Mission Control1 in Houston, 8:45 a.m. at Cape Canaveral in Florida. Beasley could see the bright glow of the shuttle as it came over California’s Owens Valley, bound for a Florida landing, still 60 miles high, traveling at about 20 times the speed of sound. Then he noticed some bright flashes, just small ones at first. Beasley idly wondered if the shuttle was shedding some debris as it entered the atmosphere. He didn’t make much of it;2 he thought he recalled that space shuttles sometimes lost a few tiles as the craft burned into the atmospnere. But then he noticed a large pulse of light. “It was like a big flare being dropped from the shuttle,” he told Newsweek. “It didn’t seem normal.”

2) A few minutes later, a few hundred miles to the east in Red Oak, Texas, Trudy Orton heard a boom as she stood on her front porch in the brightening morning. She thought it was a natural-gas explosion. “My house shook and windows rattled.” Her dog ran into the house and hid. A neighbor, loading her car, looked up and asked, “What on earth was that?” Orton looked up and saw a white streak of smoke across the sky. “It wasn’t a sleek little straight line like the jets make. It was billowing like a puffy cloud.”

3) At the Kennedy Space Center at 9 a.m., ET, the festive crowd-NASA officials, family members of the astronauts, local dignitaries and politicians, even a representative of the Israeli government, on hand to honor Israel’ s first astronaut, Col. Ilan Ramon-eagerly listened for the familiar sonic boom, heralding the arrival of the returning shuttle. But as the skies remained silent, the burble of chatter died down, then grew anxious. At about 9:05, mobile phones began to ring. Suddenly, officials were herding family members into buses. The countdown clock continued to wind down to the scheduled 9:16 landing. But the crowd was already gone.

4) The specialists inside Mission Control were well aware that the complex machines they put into space and then hope to bring home again are potential deathtraps. The rest of us forget, until a tragedy occurs, and the nation and the world are left mourning the loss of the astonishing array of hope and talent that routinely fly aboard the shuttles-113 trips, so far. When the shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas last Saturday morning, it took with it an Air Force colonel and test pilot3 (whose last job had been chief of safety for the astronaut office); a former Eagle Scout fighter jock4 (second in his class at Annapolis); a veteran African-American astronaut making his second trip into space; an India-born woman with a Ph.D. who enjoyed flying aerobatics5; a medical doctor who had performed in the circus as an acrobat; another medical doctor who was a mother, and an Israeli Air Force hero who had bombed Iraq’ s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981.

5) The seven crew members of the Columbia were finishing a 16-day mission that had gone off without a hitch6, hi between conducting dozens of scientific experiments, there had been plenty of time for stargazing. Astronaut Kalpana Chawla had told reporters how much, on a prior shuttle mission, she had enjoyed “watching the continents go by, the thunderstorms shimmering in the