As Saturday’s Columbia tragedy reminded us, when people seek knowledge, no sacrifice is too great for them to bear to find it, even when no one is watching and support wanes.

The events of last weekend give us pause, and we are struck by how cavalierly we can treat the chance to learn, humbled by the Columbia Seven’s ultimate sacrifice in a quest to expand human knowledge.

We easily forget in the comfort of our climate-controlled classrooms, sacrifice and learning constant bedfellows. From Socrates onward, knowledge has always carried a price tag. Sometimes the bill is paid in treasure. Sometimes, such as last Saturday, it is paid in lives.

Still, it is easy to downplay the value of education. There is a tendency, on this page, in loud University Union student chats and in hushed faculty offices, to diminish the value of what we’re all doing Sacramento State. Only a third of students graduate. Part-time faculty are storming the lecture halls, as administrators look to save money. Our tuition fees are going up, but it feels like the quality of our education is about to go down.

In some ways, that is also the history of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which runs the shuttle program. Now long past its heyday of carte blanche spending for manned Apollo moon shots that grabbed imaginations worldwide, NASA has been making do with tighter budgets and scaled-back earth-orbit missions for 20 years. The agency is no longer a media darling.

Shuttle missions are boring because they are so routine. Nobody was watching.

But none of that mattered to the Columbia Seven. They didn’t care about the fame. They cared about expanding knowledge. They were excited to carry out their mission in routine obscurity.

Going to class, reading a text, researching a paper can all seem pretty routine, too. But like the seven souls we watched leave us in a teardrop streak across the sky, we should love learning even when nothing “special” is happening.

It is our greatest tribute to their legacy.