Growing up, I used to watch the shuttle plumes during liftoff from my grandma’s front lawn in Delray Beach. During landing, we’d all look towards the ceiling with a smile when the sonic boom rattled through our classroom.
I was in 6th grade when the Challenger exploded a minute and a half in liftoff. My sister, two years older than me, wrote a poem in tribute that went on the back cover of her junior high school’s literary magazine that year.
17 years later when the Columbia disintegrated over Texas, I was instantly transported back to my grade school library, TVs on everywhere, teachers crying, students confused.
I can’t imagine a better time to be a space geek kid like me than growing up in Florida during the halcyon days of the Shuttle program. Back then, it was the coolest thing since the moon landing. Now, as an adult living right next door to the Space Coast, I also see it as the livelihood of thousands of proud Americans who embody our nation’s spirit for adventure and exploration. Those who take on seemingly impossible tasks:
not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win… (JFK)
While some see this as the end of our collective voyage into space, I remain optimistic. That we will renew funding for NASA, that this time of cutbacks will help us to refocus on the truly wonderful tasks instead of the mundane, and that once again we will reach beyond our grasp. That we will dare to dream again.
image via spacethebeyond: Final Shuttle landing.
Great post by DBW
