(U-WIRE) PROVIDENCE, R.I. — In the wake of the Columbia space-shuttle accident, students and professors at universities around the country grieved for the astronauts involved while expressing hope for the space program.

But letters to the nation’s newspapers told a different story, according to editorial page editor John Diaz of the San Francisco Chronicle. In an editor’s note that appeared in the paper’s Feb. 4 edition, Diaz wrote that he was surprised by the small volume and “cynical, even hateful” tone of many of those letters.

Dodie Hofstetter, Voice of the People editor at the Chicago Tribune, also found that the Columbia tragedy did not generate as much mail as originally expected.

“It was the first big nationwide event in my five years here where we didn’t have enough letters” for an extra page in the Sunday edition, Hofstetter said.

“The letters were slow in coming,” she said. “It could be because we’re so engrossed in writing letters about going to war” that other issues were not as heavily addressed, she said.

As to their tone, Hofstetter said she “saw a lot of letters questioning whether or not the astronauts were heroes and many saying the space program must go on.” But few of the letters she received discussed the possibility that the shuttle disaster was the result of sabotage or terrorism, she said.

“Those theories are out there,” Hofstetter said, “but I was lucky enough not to have to deal with them.”

Reactions at Brown were, on the whole, more sympathetic.

Brown University professor of political science Darrell West described his reaction to the tragedy as one of “complete shock.”

“We’d all gotten used to the space program being generally safe,” West said. But the space shuttle is “a very sophisticated technology that sometimes fails,” he said.

“There’s a calculated risk (in space travel), and astronauts know that full well,” said professor of geological sciences James Head. Head, who has been involved with several space exploration missions, including the Galileo unmanned spacecraft and the Mars Surveyor Mission, said the timing of the Columbia tragedy was tragic but not surprising.

“Just like airplanes, the most difficult times are takeoff and landing,” he said, which induce the “maximum stresses” on the shuttle.

Jane Widness, a freshman at Brown, expressed special regret for the Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, who died in the accident.

“Israel had so much riding on this — during the week he was up, everything stopped there,” said Widness, a NASA aficionado who is considering a concentration in astronomy. “It was a horrible blow to a country that doesn’t need any more horrible blows.”

But Widness said NASA did all it could for the Columbia.

“[The astronauts] knowingly took the risk to go into space,” Widness said. “The only thing [NASA] could have done going up was to send another shuttle or a Russian spacecraft, which wouldn’t have been practical.”

Head said as with any accident, NASA will fully investigate the Columbia tragedy and will evaluate the space program “depending on what they find out.” He said he believes the Columbia tragedy poses “no immediate danger” to astronauts staying on the International Space Station.

“They’re mourning onboard,” Head said, “but they have the resolve.”

“In the short run,” West said, “the fleet is grounded. NASA will not fly until they figure out what went wrong” with the Columbia, West said. In the meantime, we need to “reassess the mission of the space agency and (the necessary) resources,” he said.

West said that the Columbia disaster, like the Challenger tragedy in 1986, will have “major consequences for the space program.”

“People don’t understand how much it took to get into space,” Widness said. “Now that a shuttle goes up once every three to six months, [the media] doesn’t even cover the launches.” Still, she acknowledged the need for a new evaluation of NASA.

“It would be worse to discontinue the program” in the wake of the tragedy, Widness said, “but [it is] also a disservice to continue the way it is now.”

Whatever the cause of the tragedy, Head said, the space program will continue.

“We’re a very young country with a very strong sense of exploration,” Head said. “Nowhere in the history of our country have we ever turned back — have we ever shirked from exploring.”