As we once again mark the anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, I knew that I wanted to hear President Ronald Reagan’s iconic and comforting speech once again. Having read most of President Reagan’s speeches from his long career, I appreciate well-crafted rhetoric that truly inspires and comforts. The day of the Challenger disaster was no different. Scheduled to deliver the State of the Union address to Congress that very night, Reagan’s plans for January 28, 1986 took a much darker turn after the seven person crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger died when their ship exploded 73 seconds after liftoff from Kennedy Space Center in Florida due to a faulty rubber seal. Having just spent days refining a major policy speech that was destined to be postponed, the president took to the national television stage from behind his desk in the Oval Office instead. He spoke of the first couple’s personal sadness at the news of such a great loss then continued to speak of a resolute vision to continue space exploration despite tragedy. He ended his speech with these evocative words:
“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”
To summarize the national pain, the president quoted from a poem written by a Canadian fighter pilot who had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. Born in Shanghai, China in 1922, John Gillespie Magee, Jr. was the son of Canadian and American parents serving as Anglican missionaries to the region. He was an avid writer of poetry as a young adult, and one such poem he titled “High Flight” after composing it in August of 1941. He included it in a letter to his father, now a minister, on September 3, 1941. On December 11, only four days after America was attacked at Pearl Harbor, the young pilot took off in a Spitfire on a training mission near Lincolnshire, England. Diving out of the clouds at high speed, he collided midair with another plane at 1,400 feet—a height too low for a parachute to successfully open. Magee died at the age of 19, but his poem lives on in the Library of Congress today and in the hearts of millions because of its first and last lines:
“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth […] Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”[1]
A fitting and sobering connection to the midair disaster 45 years later, neither the Challenger crew nor Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee should be forgotten.
[1] “High Flight:”
"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God."