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Lives are lived amid the crackle of news, not in the dispassionate wash of history; big-picture reassurance cannot buffer the jolt of that next, frantic bulletin.
And there were other bulletins, of assassinations tried and of some that succeeded. Italy endured 23 political murders. The much loved President of Bangladesh, Ziaur Rahman, was gunned down by disgruntled soldiers. Ireland's burned-out firebrand, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, was shot seven times and lived. In West Germany, a state economics minister was shot as he slept, and died. In December, there were worldwide alerts about hit men contracted to kill Reagan by Libya's unfathomable Muammar Gaddafi. Assassination jitters seemed epidemic. After such a year, it was easy to understand why.
Blazing the Way to the High Frontier
Not often do machines, in themselves, capture the imagination of mankind. But shortly after dawn on Sunday, April 12, Americans shared a moment of pride and wonder as a spaceship, unlike any other ever built, rose from its Florida launch pad with a dramatic roar, its twin, solid-fuel rockets belching pillars of fire. Snub-nosed and stubby-winged, the strange, 122-ft.-long craft was Columbia, the world's first space shuttle. Nearly ten years in the making, three years behind schedule and 30% over budget, the $10 billion machine's maiden flight was nonetheless the technological feat of the year.
Nothing quite like "the marvel," as U.S. astronauts nicknamed the shuttle, had ever flown before. Not the Apollo moon ships, not the cavernous scientific outpost called Skylab, not the increasingly sophisticated space stations lofted by the Soviets. The shuttle is a hybrid, a cross between a rocket ship and a winged aircraft. After looping the earth 36 times, it did not splash into the sea, never to be used again. Under the control of its computers and the skilled hands of its bespectacled commander, John Young, then 50, a veteran Navy test pilot, it glided to a breathtakingly smooth landing on the Mojave Desert at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. Seven months later, the good ship Columbia climbed into orbit again, becoming the first spacecraft to fly more than once.
To a remarkable extent, the nation shared in the success of the astronauts and the thousands of technicians and engineers who helped put together the world's most intricate flying machine. In classrooms, offices and factories, work virtually ceased as all eyes focused on every available television set. Columbia seemed almost propelled by shouts of jubilation and encouragement. Humbled by the assaults on their vaunted manufacturing skills by a made-in-Japan flood of fuel-efficient cars and dazzling electronic gadgetry, Americans saw in the shuttle, along with last year's spectacular flyby of Saturn by the robot Voyager 2, reassuring evidence that the U.S. was still supreme in at least one area of high technology: the new frontier of space.