That was a half century ago, when men first squeezed into their machines and, defying gravity, rode into a new dimension of human experience. Unbound to Earth, our species could imagine that an age of spacefaring was truly under way, the Moon and Mars within reach, maybe even an asteroid where the Little Prince awaited our visit. The promised new reality legitimized fantasies.
The atmosphere here on Friday at the launching of the space shuttle Atlantis was, in some respects, reminiscent of the old days. The crowd was the largest in years, attracted by the last chance for no telling how long to see astronauts in this country leave for space.
Everything was class-reunion festive. The gray-hairs recharged memories from youth. Their grandchildren trooped along to see what had turned people on when there were just a few channels of black-and-white TV and the only telephone in the house was at the end of a cord — and the only ones twittering were sparrows.
As rain clouds hovered ominously and the countdown began to the 135th departure in the 30-year-old shuttle program, the milling crowd grew still and anxious. There was concern for the four lives in the winged space plane, of course, and all eyes searched for the break in the clouds that finally came. But this time, more than ever, spectators and others who care about NASA worried for nothing less than the future of human spaceflight in the United States.
“We’ve come full circle since 1961, back to when we had yet to show we could launch people into space,” said Steven J. Dick, a retired NASA chief historian. “We will be hitching rides from the Russians to go to the space station that is mainly ours.”
The irony of having to send our astronauts up in Russian Soyuz capsules is as plain as cold war history. The Soviet Union’s early dominance of space, manifested by the Sputnik surprise in 1957 and subsequent feats, prompted the United States to match and then surpass the Soviets in a program topped off by the Apollo 11 lunar landing in 1969. Human spaceflight would have come along anyway, but not with quite the urgency of the Soviet-American competition. » Read more: KENNEDY SPACE CENTER
