I have a hope that reincarnation is true. I would like to be on earth three hundred years from now when people from our planet are travelling to distant galaxies and interacting with beings from those galaxies. It may be a time when our common humanity takes precedence over our nationalist identities and instead of being from this or that country, we will instead identify ourselves as being from Earth. A time when the United Nations is replaced by the Earth Council. If this indeed happens, it will in no small measure be due to the seven explorers who died on Columbia, as well as all the other space explorers since the space programmes began.

When Russia and America started their space programmes in earnest in the 1960s, they were merely extensions of the Cold War arms race. Each nation was trying to outdo the advances made by the other, attempting to claim precedence and national superiority. How the emphasis has changed in the last decade! There has been a move from arms race to scientific discovery and collective efforts and collaborations that are the first infant steps towards an identifiable Earth space programme, representing to other galaxies a unified human endeavour.

When Christopher Columbus sailed his ships over the horizon to discover the New World he and his crews were not identified by the inhabitants of that world as Spanish, or Portuguese, or Italian. They were European, visitors from another single world, not a collection of countries. Today's global space programme similarly represents our world in the universe of worlds that we know are out there and hope to someday visit.

The space programme is about hope. It is about hopes of scientific and medical advances. It is about hopes of exploration and discovery. It is about hopes of security and understanding. Every astronaut represents these hopes. They are representatives of humanity's grandest dreams and noblest aspirations. When seven of our global representatives are lost, it is literally a human tragedy.

3 February 2003

Dion Marc Delport

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