With the last space shuttle flight scheduled for this Friday, I can’t help but recall my awe thirty years ago watching it all get started. The first shuttle never actually reached space, and wasn’t intended to, but the news coverage was as spine-tinglingly inspirational — to this eleven-year-old, at least — as that of the Apollo missions a decade earlier. I watched and rewatched the reentry footage on VHS, pored over sketches and cross-sectional diagrams of the shuttle in Weekly Reader, hung up a postcard of the shuttle that I’d acquired at the Hayden Planetarium. Mainly, though, I felt my youthful imagination, my pride in human accomplishment and sense of human possibility, pulled inexorably along in the shuttle’s wake.
We all know both the tragic costs and the shortsighted setbacks that have also followed in that wake. It’s impossible to know precisely what the future holds for NASA, private and international space flight (lunar colony? Mars exploration? space elevators?), and there’s more than enough reason for concern and consternation. But this week, just one more time, I’ll let myself share the thrill, the joyous audacity, of fragile humanity flinging itself, just for a moment, into the night.
Stars and snow are closer than
Woman and man.
Snow goes up in a star’s face,
Space against space,
Then crashes back.
A star comes down in a snowbank,
Tracing its bright track.
The others that sank
Here, long ago,
Are cold and still.
They are brief and beautiful,
Stars and snow.
People melt into nothing
Every morning
And never know.
-MDB
