Mars, or bust. 
I don’t think I’d get along very well with someone who couldn’t feel bad about the Columbia accident. I find lack of empathy or sympathy a bit creepy, frankly.
That’s cool, cap’n. 
Now, do you feel the same level of sympathy for those skiers mentioned above? Or if someone close to you dies? This is a real question, not a challenge.
Since I have lost both my parents in the last 10 years (my father just a few months ago) and my grandmother in 2000, I’ve sort of become accustomed to death.
And since some astronauts had already been killed on the Space Shuttle, I didn’t have the same sense of shock. It wasn’t like “Oh my God! This couldn’t happen!” It was more like “Oh this happened again.”
I would say my feelings are the same as when you find out any other sort of accident that has multiple fatalities. It’s sort of like, “Oh well. That sucks.” But I don’t beat myself up over it.
I believe you are only required to show empathy or sympathy for the death of a person if you are interacting with a loved one of the deceased.
I was watching one of those “911” type shows on the tube some years ago, and in one segment some kids (2 or 3) had fallen into a river and gotten caught in an eddy (whirlpool). This middle-aged man jumped in and managed to push or toss the kids to safety. Trouble is, he so tired himself that he was unable to escape, and drowned. Somebody filmed the whole thing.
Now that broke my heart. I lost a lot of sleep over it. I still feel deeply saddened thinking about it.
Just one ordinary dude. So why do I cry for him, and not those seven?
Peace,
mangeorge
Hey, the shuttle thing sucks and all, but people die every day doing something. Granted that 7 people dieing in a $2 billion shuttle is a little more spectacular than 4 people going down in a $5 m Black Hawk in Afghanistan or a group of kids getting killed by a truck of I-95 (all tragic), but in the end, if you didn’t know them personally, its hard to feel genuine sadness. Shuttle flights have also become a lot more routine and common since the Columbia exploded so there is less of a sense of watching a national tragedy unfold. I wouldn’t even had know the shuttle was flying except for the news of the accident.