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This Week:
- Timeline: February 2003
- Places & Culture
- For Rent: I am Sam
- Weekly Digest
On the morning of February 1, "seven people plunged toward Earth in an aging spaceship. They were more than 200,000 feet above the surface, traveling 18 times the speed of sound. It was, everyone thought, a routine flight." So wrote the Washington Post about the "humdrum" minutes before the Columbia disintegrated in the atmosphere, sending debris streaking like shooting stars through the sky. Now our spectacular sojourns into space will not soon be so taken for granted.
The shuttle was not the only terror that darkened our heavens in February.
The U.S. government's Code Orange alert heightened national anxiety about a terrorist attack, and sent some Americans scrambling to stores to buy duct tape—even though, as one columnist pointed out, "Your risk of dying in a car accident while driving to buy duct tape likely exceeds your risk of dying because you lacked duct tape." Around the same time, Osama bin Laden re-emerged with an audio message to his followers that expressed both solidarity with and disdain for Iraq. Colin Powell presented his evidence of Iraq's defiance and deceit to the United Nations, though Hans Blix said he hadn't found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and millions worldwide marched for peace. Meanwhile, soon after the satirical newspaper The Onion ran the headline, "North Korea wonders what it has to do to attract U.S. military attention," North Korea fired a missile into the Sea of Japan to spoil inauguration day in South Korea, one week after it threatened to withdraw from the 50-year-old armistice that ended the Korean War.
None of these global menaces was enough for the European Union to get religion; officials in Brussels deleted any mention of God from a draft of the EU constitution. The Vatican was more interested in the will of the divine, and decided to give its approval of the Harry Potter series.
But for all of the threats to peace—and peace of mind—what intruded on American life the most in February was a record blizzard that buried the East Coast. One of the scariest airline incidents of the month turned out to be a misunderstanding; one passenger handed a flight attendant an eerie note that prompted the pilot to turn back to the gate in D.C.; the message turned out to be an ill-repeated Air Force slogan. And at least one tyrant was deterred from his bid to control international airspace, as Rupert Murdoch backed away from his bid to buy Direct TV.
Hans Blix may not have made any big discoveries last month, but scientists did. Astronomers at Harvard found the first asteroid inside the earth's orbit, a chunk of rock a few kilometers wide that is expected to have company. NASA announced that Mars is wetter than previously thought, and astronomers worldwide celebrated the most convincing evidence yet of the Big Bang. On Earth, imagination and discovery were celebrated by the architect whose fluid design for the World Trade Center was approved by officials in New York City, by the photographer who spotted the first-ever endangered Siberian tiger in China, and by the fishers who found an Antarctic toothfish in Greenland. An earlier discovery met a less triumphant fate, as Dolly, the cloned sheep, was euthanized, but that didn't deter India from announcing plans to clone an extinct cheetah, or Nancy Reagan from announcing her support for cloning research to help afflicted patients like her husband. Meanwhile, British scientists said the aggression of the Tyrannosaurus Rex has been overstated, and promoted a gentler version.
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