To inspire and guide....

On Devon Island, in the Canadian Arctic, there are seven inukshuks. An inukshuk is an Inuit "stone man" -- it serves to comfort people on dangerous journeys and mark pathways. The inukshuks are a little smaller than life-size, and are made of stone of the area.

I know about the inukshuks firsthand because my husband helped erect some of them. As part of the Haughton-Mars Project (so named because Haughton crater on Devon is a good analog site to conditions found on Mars), he was there in the summer of 2003 and 2004 when the stone men were being built.

Were you to go to Devon -- not many people do, it's only accessible for a couple of months in the summer -- you would find the inukshuks at McCool Crossing, Husband Hill, Anderson Pass. Brown Ridge. Clark Point. Chawla Peak. Ramon Point.

Each inukshuk has the bio of one of the seven Columbia astronauts, a patch of the crew's shuttle mission, and a patch of the NASA Haughton-Mars Project. According to a statement by Pascal Lee, Principal Investigator for the Haughton-Mars Project, "it is our hope that the Columbia Inukshuks on Devon Island will help bring peace to all those who continue to miss these seven astronauts, and will help inspire and guide future generations of space explorers who will journey to the Moon, Mars and Beyond."

How interesting, to place memorials where the people who will see them are themselves explorers and scientists. To inspire people actually working to get us "to the Moon, Mars, and Beyond."

NASA is an agency of the United States government, make no mistake about that. There is bureaucracy. The politics can be byzantine, just like any other government agency. But often, you get people who work there whose idea of public service extends beyond our borders to all humanity, beyond our time to generations unseen. People think in terms of years -- sometimes in terms of decades.

There will be future Columbias, future Challengers. (Not to mention the occasional probe or rover that goes astray.) Space is not a place hospitable to humans. In many ways it's remarkable that there have been as few disasters as there have.

And there will be more inukshuks -- on Devon and elsewhere, perhaps only in our own imaginations. But there will still be those willing to take those risks, to push those boundaries.

We are all the better for it.