Mom would have liked him. So much. She would have figured out what his favorite soup was and then would have devised an elaborate explanation about what this said about him.

“What’s your favorite soup, Ben?”

“I’ve always been partial to Italian wedding.”

I go still. Dad’s favorite. I look up toward the ceiling, even though that is not at all where my mother is because she is nowhere, not even in a body bag in Malaysia.

Did you hear that? I want to say.

When the space shuttle Columbia exploded in 2003, I was only three years old. Just out of foster care, a brand-new member of the Winters family. I don’t remember Columbia, though I’m sure Dad, in a rare moment for him, had the TV on nonstop, watching the coverage. Seven astronauts died when the shuttle exploded on reentry into the atmosphere. The whole apparatus disintegrated, the pieces scattered over two states. The remains of the crew were found in the nose of the shuttle.

It’s good to find them. Even if they are gone. I’m beginning to realize this now.

When an astronaut signs up for a mission, she knows she can die. It’s a dangerous job, to say the least, and any number of things can go wrong. The Columbia wasn’t the first disaster in the field of space exploration, and it won’t be the last. This is the price we pay to know where we came from, how the universe works, and where we’re going.

When you’re up there and it’s no longer a sim, but a real-life bad news disaster, you do everything you can to science the shit out of your situation. To stay alive. You don’t give up.

But if you’re an astronaut on the ground, supporting the crew, there’s only so much you can do. You work with the data you’ve got. You do everything you can to stay in touch with the crew, to give them whatever support you can. But in the end, they’re the ones up there dealing with that rocket, that atmosphere, that universe that is hostile to life. They’re in the suit.

They say that mission control messed up with Columbia. That the Atlantis shuttle was ready to launch, and could have potentially saved the Columbia crew. Maybe. In the end, the astronauts lost consciousness. The restraints didn’t work on reentry, so their little bodies were being thrown around, bludgeoned by the capsule. The shuttle went into a flat spin and some of them died of asphyxiation before they could get their helmets on. A terrible way to go.

Like drowning.