It's been 40 years since the fire on Apollo I, so I wasn't around at the time, but I've read about it and seen documentaries. I do remember when Challenger and Columbia were lost, though. It's very strange to realize that it's been 20 years since the Challenger explosion. I don't feel that old. I was in junior high then, I believe, and I guess we were too old to watch the launch on television with the younger kids at school. Our school must not have made any announcement to the junior high and high schools (we were all in one building), because I didn't hear about it until the bus ride home. One of the younger kids was talking about the explosion, and I remember thinking that he must have mistaken the launch flames for an explosion. I didn't find out until I got home that the Shuttle had exploded. I still get chills when I see footage of the launch. The Columbia, 4 years ago, I remember more clearly. I woke up, and DH was already awake and getting his daily news f ix. I walked in and he told me that Columbia had disintegrated on re-entry. It was a very numb day, we watched the news footage of people searching on foot for debris.
Every time one of these accidents happens, people start with the arm-chair quarterbacking, saying that space travel is too dangerous, and we should stick with unmanned missions. Space travel is dangerous, don't get me wrong, but life is dangerous no matter what. The astronauts knew about the risks, they're not stupid. Any sort of exploration has risks. Heck, getting in a car or a bathtub has risks - I've had two car accidents in parking lots. I found this quote from Virgil (Gus) Grissom, one of the astronauts who died in the Apollo I fire in 1967, and I think it says it all:
“If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.”
Virgil I. Grissom, after the Gemini 3 mission, March 1965
Then, Monday morning, Barbaro was euthanized after a serious setback. He'd survived 8 months after his accident in the Preakness Stakes, and until last weekend, things were looking up. The original injury to his hind leg was almost healed, and the vets were thinking that he might be released from the hospital soon. Unfortunately, his other three legs were not doing well under the stress, and an abcess in his other hind foot was apparently the straw that brought the whole house of cards down.
And already people are saying that the owners left it too long, that Barbaro was suffering needlessly and the owners were just in it for the money that he'd make at stud later on. I don't agree. If they were just in it for the money, they probably wouldn't be in horse racing to begin with. There's an old joke: How do you make a small fortune in horse racing? Start with a large fortune. Sure, it's a joke, but there's some truth to it. From a strictly financial (and non-emotional) point of view, the owners would have been better off putting Barbaro down on the track at the Preakness and collecting the insurance money. Because I haven't heard even rumors or chat about the vet bills, but I can guarantee it'll be a large enough number to make me pass out from shock. It would take a lot of stud fees to pay that off. Even if he had survived, there was no guarantee that he'd ever be sound enough to breed (a), or that if he could be bred, that he'd be fertile at all (b), or be enough of a success at stud to make a profit (c).
(a) - from what I read, it was a tossup as to whether Barbaro would ever be sound enough to breed naturally. The Jockey Club doesn't accept artificial insemination, so if Barbaro couldn't breed naturally, he couldn't make any money as a TB sire. Other options would be breeding him to produce Appendix Quarter Horses and cross-bred sporthorses, but I doubt whether those options would have the same level of stud fees.
(b) - it's not unheard of for TBs to have fertility problems.
(c) - and even if they are fertile, they're not always a success at stud. Secretariat, one of the greatest racehorses of the 20th century, wasn't raking in the money at stud and never produced any offspring that matched his records. However, he was a good broodmare sire, and I believe his grandkids outproduced the first generation.
I was really hoping that he'd make it, even if he was just a pasture ornament for the rest of his life. He was a beautiful horse, and a tough nut to the end.
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