NASA didn’t lose a single crew member in space during the Apollo, Mercury, and Gemini missions, when human spaceflight was viewed as a risky work in progress. The only fatalities during those early years occurred during a launch rehearsal test on the ground, when the Apollo 1 spacecraft caught fire. It was only after human spaceflight was viewed as routine that we lost a NASA crew during flight. “We’ve grown used to the idea of space,” President Reagan said after the Challenger disaster, “and perhaps we forget that we’ve only just begun.”
