The Scottosphere

With one unfor­tu­nate typo I acci­den­tally deleted the last 2 weeks of e-mail. So if you’re wait­ing for me to get back to you, and I don’t… it looks like I have a good excuse for once!

It’s been over four years since Pres­i­dent Bush (that fount of sci­en­tific wis­dom!) announced his “Vision for Space Explo­ration” that ordered NASA to retire the Space Shut­tle fleet by 2010. The end is approach­ing faster than I real­ized: this week, NASA announced launch dates for the 10 remain­ing Shut­tle mis­sions.

For peo­ple of my gen­er­a­tion, the Shut­tle has been the defin­ing image of Amer­i­can space­flight. More dis­tinc­tive and grace­ful than any other space­craft, we grew up in its shadow. We watched the Chal­lenger explode when we were in kinder­garten, but that did not deter our enthu­si­asm. When astro­nauts came to speak at school we watched cliché videos of zero-G som­er­saults with rapt atten­tion. We owned die-cast mod­els of the orbiter. We vis­ited the Kennedy Space Cen­ter. We saw footage from a seem­ingly end­less sequence of picture-perfect take­offs and flaw­less land­ings on the TV news.

What I have not done is to ful­fill a life goal of mine: to watch a launch in per­son. Attend­ing one is a tricky affair: one should pro­cure a pass in advance, travel to an ugly coastal town in Florida, pray for per­fect weather, and wait. But the win­dow of oppor­tu­nity is now rapidly closing.