Atlantis: America Can Do This
As a retired couple, my wife and I have taken the opportunity to travel. We have our little camper, and right now it’s parked in the town of Sebastian, Florida. It’s hot, it’s near the ocean, and it’s a great place to be in the winter.
Yesterday we had the opportunity to visit the Kennedy Space Center, about an hour up the road. The visitor center is both a monument to the history of the space program, and also a preview of what comes next, the expedition to Mars.
But the most striking exhibit is the building dedicated to the Space Shuttle Project. It was 1970, and the Apollo project was still going to the moon. But Americans were already planning for the next phase: “Apollo is a camping trip, now we’ve got to learn how to live and work in space.”
It took almost ten years to build a vehicle that could launch as a rocket, stay in space as a vehicle, then fly home as a plane. The engineers, thousands of them, had to create all new ways of doing things; from lightweight materials that could withstand space, adhesives that would hold heat resistant tiles, an engine that could take -472 degree fuel and burn it at +6000 degrees. They were doing something no one had ever done: “gone where no one has gone before.” They built a fleet of ships that for the next twenty-six years would shuttle humans, satellites, space stations, and telescopes into space, then return to earth.
It was a combined effort of government and private industry. Sure, folks made money in the project, but the supreme effort of extending the knowledge and abilities of mankind raised the level of our humanity.
They had dramatic failures; Challenger and Columbia. But they also had enormous successes, launch after launch, one hundred thirty-five times. They didn’t have the glory of the Apollo “moon-shot,” like the drama of the Lewis and Clark expedition across the continent. Instead they had the grit of the wagon trains taking settlers across the plains and mountains: individual acts of determination that changed our history and advanced our future.
We ultimately wore them out. The last flight was in 2011. The remaining shuttles: Enterprise, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour, are now museum exhibits.
In our time, with a tremendous political crisis consuming all of our focus and attention; it’s important to remember we, Americans, can do great things. Elon Musk is an immigrant from South Africa who became an American citizen. He made his billions in computer programming developing Pay Pal and has taken part of that fortune and invested it in the next phase of space exploration.
The Space X project has already marveled the world, launching the most powerful rocket since Apollo’s Saturn 5, with its boosters return simultaneously and safely to earth. He is leading the way to our nearest neighbor planet, Mars, perhaps within this next decade. And he’s trying to do it at a tenth of the estimated cost.
Musk is an immigrant American, leading OUR American dream forward. Whether you are of “the Resistance” or “a Trumpster,” it is a place where we can all dream and work together. And while we all recognize the problems of America whether it’s guns, or education, or healthcare, or jobs: we should also recognize that Americans need to be able to dream great things as well as do regular things.
Yesterday we went to the Kennedy Space Center and saw our past and our future. Today we will sit (in a outdoor café) and watch a weather satellite launched into space. It’s my first time to see a launch, and as a kid who grew up with a crew cut like John Glenn’s (I didn’t know he was really bald) and put boxes together to make space vehicles, I’m pretty excited.
As an American, I hope we can find the new dream as compelling.
