I am glad that Congresswoman Gabby Giffords will be watching her husband, Mark Kelly, take off on Friday in the Endeavor, the next-to- last space shuttle flight. President Obama and his family will be there as well. The shuttle program ends this summer with the flight of Atlantis. Then it’s mothballs for our dreams of conquering the final frontier, and that makes me very sad.
It seems to me that spacecrafts have been taking off in the background of my life for decades. I remember when the Russians launched their first Sputnik, which orbited the earth. In high school we were made to feel it was all our fault that America had fallen behind because we had not done our math homework or taken A.P. courses in physics and chemistry.
But then President John F. Kennedy promised we would land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth. In explaining his decision, he said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, 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…”
And while we were learning how to win I would sometimes go to Cape Canaveral---which was renamed Cape Kennedy after the President’s death and then renamed back to Cape Canaveral for some reason-- with my husband, who was a journalist covering the space program. My older son was a baby then and I remember having his baby pictures taken by a top news photographer when a launch got postponed. I also remember dangling him on my knee at Fat Boy’s Barbeque, sharing ribs with Walter Cronkite while we waited for the launch to be rescheduled.
And, yes, we did get a man on the moon and Neil Armstrong took his giant step for mankind. But the moon landing was the same weekend as Ted Kennedy’s disastrous car ride at Chappaquiddick . It was hard to keep looking up when tabloid clamor interrupted our most inspiring moment in space.
Since then, it’s as if we have slowly lost interest in our forays up , up and away. Too expensive. Too pointless. We bother to look up only when tragedy happens. And yet aren’t we supposed to still be doing noble things like exploring space--not because they are easy but because they are hard, and because we should always be dreaming of new worlds.
My younger son is still a Trekkie, with a Star Trek insignia on his baseball cap, and my husband is convinced there is life out there, millions and millions of miles away. I still hope that at another time we will have the resources and the energy to find out.
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