Every year around this time, I take a few moments in my classes to acknowledge the American astronauts who have died while serving their country. All of their accidents took place on dates during this week of the year.

I often start sobbing when I talk about these awesome Americans, and this year was no exception. My second and sixth period classes especially got to experience the waterworks.

It’s partly because I’ve loved the space program since I was a kid, growing up near the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the home of Mission Control and the center of astronaut training. We visited many times when I was growing up, and my middle school was just a couple of sidewalks from NASA Road 1, which used to be the route everyone took to drive there. And my mom was a flight manager in the space shuttle program for a number of years.

But I also get a lot of strong feelings when talking about the astronauts because their lives challenge us with questions of what we will commit our lives to, how we will use the time that we are given, and what we might be willing to give our lives for. As I shared my reflections with my classes, I invited my students to prayerfully consider these questions.

The astronauts knew there was a risk to their lives, as there always is when you put people on top of one-and-a-half million pounds of rocket fuel and light it up. They knew what they were committed to and what they were willing to give their lives for.

I feel like it would benefit all of us to give some thought to these things as we grow up and grow older.

Collage bottom left: Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died aboard the Apollo 1 crew capsule during mission testing, a few weeks before the scheduled launch. A spark in the capsule, which back then used a 100% oxygen environment, started a flash fire that took their lives. Grissom was preparing for his third flight, having been one of America’s original seven astronauts; Ed White was the first American to perform a space walk on his previous flight; Roger Chaffee was going on his first one. They died January 27, 1967.

Collage top: January 28, 1986 was a Tuesday. I was in the ninth grade at Clear Creek High School, just a few miles from the Johnson Space Center, and at the moment of the accident, I was in third period biology class dissecting frogs. After fourth period honors geometry, someone in the hall said the space shuttle had exploded. (The accident took place during the ascent stage of flight, just a bit more than one minute after launch.) I couldn’t believe it. It shocked the whole nation, and the outpouring of grief across the country was profound. It was, in my view, one of the two national tragedies that have happened in my lifetime, the other being 9/11.

The seven Challenger astronauts were more representative of our nation’s diversity than many previous American crews; two women out of a crew of seven may not seem very equitable, but that was a lot back then. Ellison Onizuka of Hawai’i, the first Asian American in space, was a Buddhist; Judy Resnik was Jewish; Ron McNair, the second African American in space, was a Baptist. All three were making their second space flight. But this flight was best known as the one with the teacher – Christa McAuliffe, a high school social studies teacher who had been selected out of 11,000 applicants to the Teacher in Space program. She went through astronaut training and was planning to deliver lessons from space. Similar to how astronauts from other countries get a small flag of their home nation on the mission patch, Ms. McAuliffe got an apple next to her name.

Collage bottom right: February 1, 2003 was a Saturday. America’s first shuttle ever in space, Columbia, broke up during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere due to heat shield damage incurred two weeks earlier, during launch. After I heard the news, I called my mom, crying. “It happened again,” I said. This crew also represented more closely the inclusiveness of our country; for example, Kalpana Chawla was making her second flight, with her previous mission making her the first woman of South Asian heritage in space. One member of the crew was Ilan Ramon, who became the first Israeli in space during the flight.

I ended my reflections with my classes by praying for comfort for the astronauts’ loved ones and for guidance in our own lives, that we might, as Moses writes in Psalm 90.12, “number our days aright.”

(Image at top of page: The Space Mirror Memorial at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA photo.)