I’m sitting here feeling a little bummed because I missed watching live coverage of the last-ever Space Shuttle launch (by about seven minutes). I’ve watched a number of launches and landings and I meant to pay attention during the last one, but I forgot.
I grew up during some of the best years of the US space program. I saw 2001 at a tender age and, as a kid, pretty much expected that I’d eventually travel in space–at least to a space station, if not to the moon. I watched Apollo launches and moon walks. I had a plastic model of the Apollo-Soyuz docking mission. My dad had a contest to predict the *cough cough* unplanned re-entry date of Skylab. I probably still have a photo somewhere of the first Space Shuttle, perched on top of a 747, clipped from the local newspaper. In recent years I’ve watched webcasts of Shuttle launches and space walks during the assembly of the ISS.
Despite that, I never really considered a career in space exploration. In retrospect I’m not sure why; it probably would have seemed beyond my reach at the time I was considering such things, and by then I’d become fascinated with computers and synthesizers. (Computer engineers are useful for space exploration; synthesizer builders, not so much, despite the presence of an ARP 2500 in the scene in Close Encounters.) Someone from my high school class ended upon a Shuttle, though, and I felt very happy for him because I knew he’d wanted to go into space all his life.
Two of my most vivid memories of the Shuttle program come from my college years. One involves, of course, the Challenger disaster. One of the things that struck me about that event at the time was how personally it affected all of the other engineering majors I knew. None of us were directly involved so one couldn’t really call it a personal loss as such, although one of the astronauts who died had graduated from our university years previously. It felt personal because the space program was important to all of us because of what it represented as much as what it did. The Space Shuttle the pinnacle of engineering at the time. It embodied the best efforts of people in the fields that we aspired to join. It was a symbol of everything that was cool about being a nerd. We weren’t the guys picking up women at parties, but we were the guys who were gonna help explore “the final frontier” after graduation. When the Challenger exploded we all lost something.
The other memory was from a lecture by one of the Shuttle pilots a year or two before that. He spoke at a campus lecture hall and showed slides from his recent mission. After his presentation he answered questions from the audience. Someone asked, “what’s it like to live in zero gravity?” All of his formality fell away as a huge grin spread across his face, and he replied, “it’s really great!” It has always looked like fun to me, and I was happy to hear first-hand confirmation.
I guess there’s still a chance I’ll travel in space some day, but the odds look a lot smaller than they did when I was a kid. There’s an article here at cnn.com about how the glamor has faded from space exploration during the years since the beginning of the Space Race. I won’t pretend to say that I have strong opinions about whether or not the Shuttles should be retired. It’s a big decision with many factors–some technical, some economic, some political. I do know, though, that it makes me very sad, particularly because we seem to be losing our ability to look out at the stars with wonder and aspiration.
Safe trip, Atlantis. I’ll be watching your return.
I remember vividly watching the very first launch; was on at lunchtime over here (UK) and I had special permission to eat my lunch on the sofa in front of the TV. Happy childhood memories. 🙂
Never had a Apollo-Soyuz model but my parents wrote to NASA on my behalf and I was sent some cool prints of the crews and an artists impression of the linkup. I was knocked out to have this object all the way from NASA, a direct physical link to the stuff I saw on tv.
Sad though to see it end, I felt the same way with the last Concorde flight; as a kid you just assume it would be the start of a long line of supersonic airliners, not the one and only.
Getting genuine NASA swag is indeed a knock-out–lucky you!
Yeah, I’m also disappointed that I never got to fly on the Concorde. It was such a pretty plane. I saw a headline not long ago about someone working on a new supersonic airliner, but I don’t know the details. Of course it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to afford it even if it does go into service.