Story highlights Leroy Chiao: Past tragedies put Thursday's SpaceX explosion into perspective

Investigation will find root cause of blast, and can-do spirit will revive SpaceX

Leroy Chiao is a former NASA astronaut and commander aboard the International Space Station. During his 15-year career, he flew four missions into space, three times on space shuttles and once as the copilot of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station. On that flight, he served as the commander of Expedition 10, a six-and-a-half month mission. He has performed six spacewalks, in both US and Russian spacesuits, and has logged nearly 230 days in space. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) The dream of flight began with early humans, who watched birds dart back and forth and soar high above. This dream extended to spaceflight, as humans realized that there is more above than just our sky, that the stars are like our sun and that there are planets orbiting those stars.

For me, the dream of spaceflight started at an early age. We were just taking the first steps to fly into space by the time I was old enough to understand what was happening. I watched with excitement as America planned the Apollo missions, which would fly us to the moon.

Leroy Chiao

Then, tragedy struck, with the Apollo I fire. Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed in their spacecraft, while still on the ground during what was supposed to be a routine test. The nation was in shock. We had never lost astronauts before.

True to form, NASA thoroughly investigated the accident, lessons were learned, changes were made and we flew again, launching the crew of Apollo 7 into orbit less than two years later, and flying Apollo 11 to the moon less than a year after that.

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This helps to put into perspective what happened Thursday.

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