End of an Era

This Thursday, the space shuttle Discovery is slated to ‘slip the surly bonds of Earth’ one last time. The six crew members flew in to Cape Canaveral today to make their final preparations for the flight. When Endeavour launches in April and finally, Atlantis in June, the world will change for us a little bit.

When I was a kid, I received a book for Christmas that described all the great things we were eventually to do in space. I imagined myself as an astronaut, exploring worlds then unknown.  When my parents got me a football helmet, they might have been less than thrilled to see me turn it into a spaceman’s headgear. Footballs were sub-orbital bodies and therefore, not of much interest to a future spaceman.

I watched with rapt attention the Mercury, then Gemini and finally Apollo missions that took us to the moon and back. Eventually, this goggle-eyed boy grew up to work at a company that made critical parts for some of the shuttle missions. I couldn’t help staring at the parts that would help put the Hubble telescope in orbit with something approaching awe.

Kids who read the same books and Popular Science articles as I did grew up to be the engineers and physicists and chemists and life systems technicians and pilots who populated the programs that once had seemed so far away and yes, improbable.

My own children grew up in a world in which humans had been to the moon and our probes to other planets of the solar system. They don’t recall when space exploration was an ‘if.’ For them, it’s always been a matter of ‘next.’ 

I recall when a manned launch made front page international news, when we brought TVs in to work so the employees could watch and everyone’s tummy muscles would tighten as we collectively willed the vehicle aloft. Nowadays, I doubt that one American in twenty knows how many humans are currently in space or when the next launch is scheduled to occur.

It’s a part of the natural order of things that the extraordinary becomes commonplace through repetition. That which once thrilled us no longer causes raised eyebrows.

What I’m wondering tonight is what the next wonder will be. What will amaze and thrill our children? I believe the problems they’ll face will be, as has always been the case, mostly terrestrial.

How will they feed, clothe and especially, educate the world’s population? How will they provide clean water and medicine at the fringes of society? How will we offer the same opportunities to a child of the inner city as we provide for children in affluent suburbs?

It seems to me that humanity’s greatest achievement will come when we gain the same excitement from building affordable housing here on Earth as we do from building a space station.