Free The As It Happens Files by Mary Lou Finlay Page B

tenth of what it had been in 1989. The Kremlin had decreed that
Mir
could be kept aloft only if they could find a private backer to pay for it. (Would they consider re-naming it the Ted Rogers Space Centre?) The buildings at Star City looked shabby and neglected; people were scarce. I thought all this must be very hard on Russian pride, but Krikalev said he understood that times were hard and that the country had other priorities. He added, though, that he was concerned about the lost opportunity.
    “Space is our future,” he told me, “our science, the education of the next generation.”
    The Russian space programme was an important symbol, but it was also more than a symbol. Obviously, he hoped the programme could be saved. For Sergei Krikalev, at least, the ride was not over. He continued to go into space and was involved in a number of missions with the Americans, including, in 1994, the first joint U.S.-Russian Space Shuttle Mission. The much-decorated (did I mention also charming and handsome?) cosmonaut has spent more time in space than any other person—803 days to date—and is slated to fly again in 2009, although his appointment as Vice-President of theEnergiya Corporation, which now runs the Russian space fleet, may preclude that.
    Listening to Chris Hadfield and Julie Payette and Sergei Krikalev talk about their experiences made me realize I was still very much caught up in the romance of space travel after all, but my love affair with the shuttle took another bashing when
Columbia
burned up somewhere over Texas. Texas, George W. Bush’s home state, and just before the invasion of Iraq … the symbolism was haunting. Once again it looked as though the gods were angry and the brave space pilots were somehow being punished for the sins of their commanders on the ground. That’s not just superstition, by the way: dollars spent fighting wars are often dollars that don’t get spent somewhere else, like maybe making space travel safer.
    The immediate cause of the disaster had to do with
Columbia
’s heat shield, which had sustained some damage on take-off. One might have imagined that this would set off alarm bells at NASA, but as Roberta Bondar reminded us, such things had happened before without consequences. This might explain why no one thought it necessary to try to find out exactly how much damage the shuttle had sustained. Tragically, it was too much.
    Bondar also told us it wasn’t the first re-entry that had gone badly wrong. It had happened to the Russians, she told us—only they had managed to hush it up at the time. In that episode, the cosmonauts knew well in advance that they weren’t going to make it back alive. They radioed their families and said their goodbyes and awaited their awful fate.
    Would anyone at NASA have known that
Columbia
wasn’t going to come back in one piece?
I wondered. Roberta Bondar didn’t think so.

SIX
Rugged Roses
Bittersweet radio
    ML: Hello, I’m Mary Lou Finlay.
    BB: Good evening, I’m Barbara Budd.
    This is
As It Happens.
    THEME THEME THEME
    BB: Tonight:
    ML: Defending the commissioner’s work ethic. A Liberal MP says Bernard Shapiro is the right man for the job.
    BB: A web of influence. An Iranian exile in Toronto uses his blog to say what he couldn’t say back home.
    ML: Ferreting out those weapons of mass destruction. A British government memo reveals that pilots were told to goad Saddam Hussein into war by firing on Iraqi installations.
    BB: The eagle has landed. With a thud. An Alaska man looks on as a bald eagle crashes through his neighbour’s window and drops its fish.
    ML: Mortar-fied. An Ontario man is surprised to learn that an old shell he kept in his garden shed was armed and ready to detonate.
    BB: And a Canadian journal settles an ontologicalquestion that has puzzled great thinkers for centuries: what is the funniest philosophy joke?
    As It Happens,
the Wednesday edition. Radio that is.
    This is what the first page of script looks like for