current mood: inspired
current music: The Album Leaf – The Light
Today, I am again a little boy.
The day lights up with fire. Billions of molecules of air are beating relentlessly back and forth in a dull but loud roar. It’s so loud at the source that 300,000 gallons of water are dumped beneath this behemoth machine to keep the sound waves generated by the engines from ripping the supporting structure apart. The giant white clouds that billow out are not smoke, but steam. I am staring in wonder as I see for the first, and probably last time, an event I’ve imagined all my life.
Back in my house 20 years ago, I can follow the extremely predictable path down the flight of stairs that led to my room. My room was a shrine to space. Around the perimeter was an entire box of colored cards with every conceivable object in the solar system and beyond on them – the planets, asteroids, the then-in-the-solar-system probes Voyagers 1 & 2. A mobile of the solar system hung over my bed. I frequently had books from the library – large, colorful portraits of the cosmos. Above my desk was mounted a poster – a beautiful shot of Discovery lifting off. The caption read “Our successes are only as big as our dreams.” One of my favorite make-believe games involved turning my small closet into the cockpit of a spaceship. Alphie the robot became a control panel. A tiny driving game transformed into the steering wheel of my ship. The classic yellow Playskool flashlight with red and green filters provided dramatic illumination, while my mother’s laundry steamer provided smoke when the aliens attacked.
The space shuttle captured my imagination in a wondrous way when I was growing up. I don’t remember ever being particularly interested in becoming an astronaut (from the time I was three until around I was about fifteen years old, I wanted desperately to be a doctor.) but space and rockets were amazing to me. I remember the Hubble Space Telescope’s first images sent back to earth after the servicing mission in 1993 – grand, sweeping portraits of interstellar space, pictures of dust clouds so beautiful in color and grandeur as to be almost unbelievable. In the pictures captured by the electric eyes of Hubble I could imagine entire other worlds – worlds with snowflakes and butterflies and volcanoes and – perhaps – intelligent life. The possibility was exciting. I had the opportunity to participate in a program at the old Science Center of Iowa – a mock space flight, on which I played the part of a mission medial specialist. Walking into “Mission Control” for the first time and seeing a mock-up of the real thing was electrifying.
Today, I’m the same little boy that used to sit in his closet with a walkie talkie and flashlight and made-up control panels. Today I’m standing at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral Florida, watching one of the last space shuttle missions launch. Atlantis is again in front of me, but this time it’s the real thing. This time, I’m seeing the amazing power of arguably one of the most impressive flying machines in human history shake loose the bonds of gravity and ride toward the heavens on pillars of fire. Twin solid rocket boosters providing millions of pounds of thrust as a chapter in human spaceflight comes to a close. Soon, all of the remaining airworthy shuttles – Atlantis, Discovery, Endeavor – will join Enterprise and be decommissioned. They will be sold for display in museums, scrapped for parts, or left sitting, a testament to man’s continual venturing out into the cosmos. We have only just gotten our feet wet, dabbled our toes in the cosmic ocean at our doorstep.
The space shuttle is not the most efficient system, nor is the ISS a particularly excellent use of resources. There have been setbacks. Challenger and Columbia’s ill-fated missions still hang in our minds, a testament to the dangers of space exploration. But they are some of our first attempts. Undoubtedly – hopefully – we will conceive of and build others. 380,000 kilometers away, in a flat dry plain that humans have in a moment of optimism called the Sea of Tranquility, there is a footprint, left by the first human to walk on another world. We must not stop there. We must continue to explore for exploration’s sake, and continue to participate in the wondrous adventure of the cosmos.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks