Excuse me for being a bit amazed.
I'm sitting here watching NASA TV. They are about to show, live, the launch of a Soyuz rocket taking three people up to the International Space Station, including one woman. What's blowing my mind here, when I stop to think about it:
1. Live coverage of a Russian space launch. When I was growing up I was obsessed with the space program and all things astronautish. Remember we were in the middle of the Cold War then, and the American and Soviet space programs were tremendously competitive with one another. There wouldn't have been any question of cooperating on a mission like this; and if they'd allowed us to see live coverage of one of their launches (or if we'd allowed them to see one of ours), it would have been only by way of demonstrating some kind of superiority.
2. Women astronauts. Also, civilian astronauts, period. Back in the day, all astronauts were white men who'd served as test pilots in the military. Women astronauts still seem kind of amazing to me. (In a good way, of course.)
3. NASA TV! Jeez, if we'd had this when I was a kid, I would have been glued to it 24/7. I remember being absolutely riveted to the TV anytime there was a moon landing, a moon walk, a space walk, a launch, a splashdown. It was a Big Deal. Now, you can sit here and watch the folks at Mission Control casually chatting with astronauts about football scores. When the space shuttle passes through a brief communication gap and things go silent for a few minutes, there's no sense of tension broken by the relief of those first words back -- I remember almost holding my breath when an orbiting spaceship would go briefly silent, then eventually get picked back up by Arecibo or somewhere. I always watched CBS coverage because Walter Cronkite seemed to know the most about the space program. I remember what a huge, huge deal it was to see those first blurry black-and-white images beamed back with the words at the bottom of the screen reading LIVE FROM THE MOON.
Space travel isn't routine now, by any means -- not in the way that commercial air travel is. It's still, as we all know too well, still pretty fucking dangerous, pretty fucking fraught. But it's something I still believe in -- exploration, learning about this universe we're part of. And there goes the Soyuz, streaking upwards at 1100 mph, a brilliant star rising over Kazakhstan. And I'm sitting here in the middle of Indiana, watching it. Wow. Just amazing. Wow.
1. Live coverage of a Russian space launch. When I was growing up I was obsessed with the space program and all things astronautish. Remember we were in the middle of the Cold War then, and the American and Soviet space programs were tremendously competitive with one another. There wouldn't have been any question of cooperating on a mission like this; and if they'd allowed us to see live coverage of one of their launches (or if we'd allowed them to see one of ours), it would have been only by way of demonstrating some kind of superiority.
2. Women astronauts. Also, civilian astronauts, period. Back in the day, all astronauts were white men who'd served as test pilots in the military. Women astronauts still seem kind of amazing to me. (In a good way, of course.)
3. NASA TV! Jeez, if we'd had this when I was a kid, I would have been glued to it 24/7. I remember being absolutely riveted to the TV anytime there was a moon landing, a moon walk, a space walk, a launch, a splashdown. It was a Big Deal. Now, you can sit here and watch the folks at Mission Control casually chatting with astronauts about football scores. When the space shuttle passes through a brief communication gap and things go silent for a few minutes, there's no sense of tension broken by the relief of those first words back -- I remember almost holding my breath when an orbiting spaceship would go briefly silent, then eventually get picked back up by Arecibo or somewhere. I always watched CBS coverage because Walter Cronkite seemed to know the most about the space program. I remember what a huge, huge deal it was to see those first blurry black-and-white images beamed back with the words at the bottom of the screen reading LIVE FROM THE MOON.
Space travel isn't routine now, by any means -- not in the way that commercial air travel is. It's still, as we all know too well, still pretty fucking dangerous, pretty fucking fraught. But it's something I still believe in -- exploration, learning about this universe we're part of. And there goes the Soyuz, streaking upwards at 1100 mph, a brilliant star rising over Kazakhstan. And I'm sitting here in the middle of Indiana, watching it. Wow. Just amazing. Wow.