NASA - SHUTTLE REMEMBERED

So it's over, the Space Shuttle now goes down in the history books.  We all have our memories of the shuttle and what it meant to us as a Nation and I am no exception.  So lets take a walk down memory lane.

I was very young when I heard about the "Race to Space" and JFK talking about a Man going to the Moon.  We all thought it was science fiction because that's what was in the comic books and in the movies at the time; though the Russians has just launched Sputnik.  We had Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers to fuel our imagination but now here was our President saying we were going to explore the stars.

Then I watched John Glen outside of his capsule which wasn't more than a ballistic missile with a place for humans in the nose.  But with television we also got to see when the 3 parachutes opened and it landed in the Pacific Ocean, WOW!

I was watching Star Trek on our RCA XL100 the only neighborhood color TV and I wondered what was next.  I didn't have long to wait as we landed Neil Armstrong on the lunar surface and a Princeton Professor by the name of O'Neil calling for a space station and the L5 Society saying "L5 in 99"; (L5 or Lunar 5 is the spot between the Earth and the Moon best suited for a space station...I think the current one is about there right now.

There were movies like "2001 A Space Odyssey" and something on the drawing board called the Space Shuttle.  I was fascinated and so I joined the Navy as an Aerospace Medical Technition and was trained in the same facility where research went on to explore the effects of outerspace on the human body.  Soon NASA rolled out the very first Shuttle and used it as a test vehicle; it's name, "Enterprise", how appropriate.

Soon shuttle flights were common and they got little press coverage.  We as a nation were thrilled with something called "ISS" the International Space Station and the Shuttle was the workhorse to supply it.

I was fortunate enough while doing my Reserve time at Cecil Field Physiology Unit to tag along on a behind the scenes tour of NASA Operations to include an up close view of 2 of the Shuttles, the Assembly Facility, the research area for the up-coming Mars Mission and talk with the people involved.  The tour was right after the Challenger disaster and the Flight Surgeon, who was our guide, explained the changes in safety protocols that had come out of it since the days of Gemini, Apollo and now the Shuttle.  Yes, we had many set backs and I got to see the pad where the Gemini Astronauts perished in a ball of fire and pieces of the wreckage from Challenger that they were still looking over.  I held in my hand the ceramic tiles that cost so very much and had caused so many headaches both on the ground and in space for the shuttle crews. 

Still, it surprises me when Senator Nelson a former Astronaut, that NASA is now on hold and the only place we can dream is either from other countries like France and Russia or in the movies.  Our current President and obviously Senator Nelson feel NASA and the dreams of little boys and girls wanting to be Astronauts means nothing for our future.  Someone needs to explain that to me, didn't they watch the movie "October Sky"? I guess not.  For those of us who have memories of all of the short-lived NASA experience, we will continue to dream.

Doc