Hubris and the Big Kablooie

For the last few evenings, we have gathered with a couple folks in the church parking lot in the expectation of seeing a rocket launch from Wallops Island in Northern Virginia.  On Monday night, the launch was aborted because of a sailboat, which was kind of funny, to think that the launch of a vehicle into space could be prevented by something as mundane and ancient as a sailboat.  Tuesday night had a few more clouds but it was sailboat free, and again we were there watching the countdown on an ipad and waiting for the little dot to stream up into outer space.
Even in an age when we are surrounded by technology, and you probably can't even look up in  a clear sky for very long without a satellite zooming by, this still seemed like an auspicious moment.  Something of the little kid who plays with rocketship toys comes out and you're in awe of our human endeavor.
At the moment when the little point of light was supposed to climb into view, I saw an orangish glow on the clouds, and then shortly thereafter the keeper of the ipad says, "That's not supposed to happen," and shows us the enormous fireball on the launchpad where the rocket had, until recently, stood.
It turns out, launching tons of steel and supplies into space is still kind of difficult.
The capsule was unmanned, and no one was hurt, except for maybe what I assume are the fairly prodigious egos of the people who design rockets, aka rocket scientists.
It reminded me of the fact that we take so much for granted when it comes to our technology.  Our world is balanced on some very fragile shoulders at the moment.  We are dependent on a decaying infrastructure of roads and an electronic grid that is, by most accounts, sadly obsolete.  We lost our phones and internet for the afternoon because someone crashed into a pole down the street.  The amount of work that got done in that time period was negligible, no calls made, no emails sent, everything sort of ground to a halt.
Now, I'm not one for dystopian visions of future disasters, I would imagine that if something catastrophic were to happen to our world, human society would probably hold on to some semblance of civilization, because it's just kind of what we do.  I don't really buy the apocalyptic visions put forth in movies like The Road Warrior, or in Cormac MCarthy's The Road.  I tend to think that people will tend to recover societal order rather more quickly than might be expected in the wake of a disaster.  Especially in the years since Hurricane Katrina, we have seen steady improvement in our level of preparation for such disasters.
That still doesn't take away the rather stark and despairing moment when the fireball erupts on the launch pad, when we remember that all our calculations and preparations could be for naught.
It is more a triumph of the human spirit to sift through the wreckage and rebuild and go again, than it is to marvel at the perfection of a single launch.
Knowing that a fireball is always a very real possibility makes the little points of light that we launch into the endless dark all that much more impressive.