The aeroplane will never fly.
- Lord Haldane, Minister of War, Britain (1907)
And then, the Earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun. The Earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the Universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds.
- Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
Yeah, things suck these days. It would be easy to focus on all that’s wrong with this country at the moment- and there’s a lot that is- but negativity doesn’t really get us anywhere, does it? Say what you will about the state of our economy, our politics, or anything else…but damn, we know how to light a Roman candle, eh?
I never cease to be amazed at the launch of a space craft. The size, the explosive power, the engineering…to me it just looks like a massive bomb looking for a place to detonate. Yes, there have been tragedies (Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia), but to me the space program has always represented everything that’s good about this country. Americans took a challenge posed by JFK and created a program that put men in space, on the moon, and helped to build a habitable space station in Earth orbit. I can still remember virtually everything about the moment when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the surface of the moon. The space program has for me always been an magical, awe-inspiring exercise, magical simply because the engineering far exceeds my puny ability to grasp it.
We’ve long since reached the stage where the launch of a space shuttle is not the breaking news event it once was. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, a launch is never a routine or mundane event in my eyes. To me, it represents challenge, promise, commitment, and the desire to look beyond the forces that bind us to Earth. I don’t know that I’ll see a human being setting foot on another planet in my lifetime, but I find it comforting to know that there are those among us willing to dream the dreams it will take to make that a reality. Someday we’ll begin to find out whether or not we really are alone. I just wish that I could be alive to experience that day.
We can, and perhaps should, be arguing over whether we can continue to afford a government program designed to launch rockets into space. For my money, though, there are few things more uniquely and quintessentially American than the launch of a rocket from Cape Canaveral. Sometimes, in the moments of our history when things look the darkest, a grand gesture such as this can serve to remind us what we’re capable of- and we’re still capable of great things.
