An Open Letter to Miles O’Brien
Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Challenger disaster—an event that permanently changed America’s relationship with space, risk, and exploration.
It also feels like the right moment to recognize someone whose professional life has become inseparable from the story of America’s space program.
Miles O’Brien. He currently serves as the science correspondent for PBS NewsHour and a producer/director for the documentary series NOVA and FRONTLINE. He also works as an aviation analyst for CNN and operates his own production company, Miles O’Brien Productions.
Miles, your career has not merely chronicled spaceflight. In many ways, it has helped carry it.
I want to write this both publicly and personally.
I was in the CNN newsroom—in the control room—when Space Shuttle Columbia was lost on February 1, 2003, disintegrating during re-entry over Texas. At the time, I was serving as senior terrorism and national security analyst and senior producer.
Space Shuttle Challenger & Columbia Crews
I watched the room go silent. I watched producers and editors struggle to process what they were seeing. And I watched you do something very rare in television: you stayed calm, precise, humane, and honest in the middle of a national shock.
But there is a deeper, rarely appreciated layer to that day.
After years of negotiations between CNN and NASA, an agreement was in place for you to become the first journalist to fly on a Space Shuttle mission, traveling to the International Space Station. The plan was real. It was imminent. An announcement was expected in February 2003.
Instead, on February 1, 2003, Columbia was lost — along with all seven members of her crew.
In a single morning, you went from being slated to follow them into orbit, to being the person who had to explain to the world why they were not coming home.
And then you did something almost impossible: you covered the disaster live, for hours, with discipline, technical clarity, moral gravity, and visible humanity — while carrying a private grief and shock that most people in that position would have been unable to contain.
You were not just explaining a systems failure. You were helping a nation understand the loss of seven people — professionals, explorers, friends — and the meaning of a program that had once again revealed both its nobility and its cost.
Over the years, you have helped Americans understand not only what NASA does, but why it matters. You have translated complexity without dumbing it down. You have explained risk without sensationalism. You have honored astronauts not as symbols, but as professionals — engineers, pilots, scientists, pioneers — who knowingly accepted the burden of pushing the frontier forward.
You have been there in moments of wonder. And you have been there in moments of grief. And in both, you have been something increasingly rare: a serious, trustworthy witness to history.
On this anniversary of Challenger — and in memory of Columbia and all who were lost — I wanted to say something simple and long overdue:
Thank you!
Thank you for your professionalism. Thank you for your steadiness under pressure. Thank you for your moral seriousness. And thank you for helping a nation understand both the price and the purpose of reaching for the stars.
With respect and admiration,
Ken Robinson