When I got home that night, my parents remembered the Apollo tragedy and how that shook their generation and their parents.

I am not sure if this tragedy could have been avoided. The news reports consistently say that when the initial problem occured during launch, scientists from NASA and around the world conferred with each other and the astronauts on board, and ultimately the damage assessment was concluded to be minor. If I recall, the culprit behind Challenger was considered a minor design flaw. But to use a cliche, this is rocket science - and if using exact measurements in chemistry is important in high school, then using exact science when caring for our nation's bravest and most intelligent should be exact as well.

Maybe we need to decide if we are going to un-neuter NASA or abandon it for good; quite honestly, we can't afford to lose any more of the world's best scientists due to poorly calculated risks because of one thing: money.

The most ghastly thing I have seen so far is the father of Captain Brown, Paul Brown during a brief interview on CNN. He was expressing his desire to have something of his son to bury - while we watched he tried to console himself to the fact that there really would be nothing other than, perhaps, some charred DNA. He had seen the footage, he knew.

It was very painful to watch this personal struggle while all we could do is shake our heads with distant grief, a grief that now feels all too familiar.