Living Interplanetary Space Flight Experiment--or Why Were All the Strange Creatures on the Shuttle

This morning, the world witnessed the safe landing of the space shuttle Endeavour, after a 16-day mission to the International Space Station. For those of us inhabiting Earth’s more western time zones, we got to watch the landing last night, with no inconvenience, other than having to divert from the Colbert Report. While I did not travel to the Kennedy Space Center for the landing and recovery of the Planetary Society’s experiment known as Shuttle LIFE, my experience was infinitely better than it was the last time that I had an experiment on a shuttle, when I did go to the Cape to attend the landing.

This is because the last time for me was on February 1, 2003. I was waiting for the return of the Columbia, with friends and colleagues, Eran Schenker and Yael Barr, alongside the very runway where the Endeavour glided to a touch down this morning. Having developed the Planetary Society’s "GOBBSS" experiment –which came to be known as the "Peace Experiment", since we had recruited two students, one Israeli, the other Palestinian, to work together as co-investigators– I anticipated the post-flight analysis of the biological cultures from GOBBSS, and from two other experiments that Eran had developed dealing with probiotic microbes. But there was no sonic boom, no sign of the Columbia. The time to landing clock went into positive time, and we were directed to return to the bus that would take us back to the building where we had gathered earlier. Then we learned of the tragic fate of the seven people who had made up the Columbia’s crew, and we no longer cared about the experiments.