Thinking about Space- Part One

Perhaps it is the interminable delays of the upcoming Endeavour launch, or this weekend's brief New York Times interview with Buzz Aldrin ahead of the release of his new memoir, or the upcoming 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, but I have been thinking about space again. It's not unusual for me to think about space, as I have been a junkie ever since I was a kid, fueled by the twin stars- Wars and Trek- as well as a love of science fiction. I remember watching the first launch of Columbia and when it landed; my fifth grade class stopped everything for the landing, America's first step back into space since Skylab, which had been abandoned in 1974, came home early in 1979. So I thought.

The first sign that this was something less than the exploration of strange new worlds came only a few months after that launch. Living in Newport News, Virginia, we had access to the NASA Langley facitlity, and it was not unheard of for NASA personnel to go to schools and talk to kids. So it was that sometime in the fall of 1981 that my fifth grade class was visited by such a person.

I was pumped. I was space happy. I knew everything there was to know about the Space Shuttle: dimensions, timing of jettisoning solid rocket boosters and fuel tank, range, speed. I drew shuttles constantly; I had a little die cast shuttle with bay doors that opened and had detachable pieces. I longed for a Lego model.

One of the things I knew was that the moon was a quarter million miles away and that the range of the shuttle was about 1000 miles, not even to the Lagrange point where the Justice League's satellite orbited in the comics. So, I asked, was there any way the shuttle could be used to go to the moon. It was, upon reflection, a naive question, but I was in fifth grade after all.

Why would we want to go to the moon, he asked in response, and I was heartbroken.

I know now that he was not sent to crush my spirit, but that he reflected the consensus that, for science, low earth orbit was the place to be. But science is not the only reason to go to space, and it is these other reasons that require us, as Americans and as human beings, to return to the moon and move beyond it. In coming posts I hope to explore what space means to me and the reasons I think manned exploration is important.