"Captain's Log," Stardate February 24, 2011

I logged onto the Internet tonight to see that the space shuttle Discovery had taken its final flight into space this morning. I clearly remember the first time a shuttle was launched into space and returned safely. I was in junior high school, in my science class, of all places, and our teacher, an aging man (who died later that year), set up a television set and we watched a replay of the launch which had occurred two days earlier, then watched, live, Columbia's flawless landing. It was a thrilling start to a new age in space exploration in which a manned space craft could actually return to earth in the beautiful and majestic form of a giant gliding aircraft with wings, and return to space again! I had remembered the test flight of the Enterprise shuttle four years earlier, before I had reached puberty and was steeped in the then brand new Star Wars phenomenon of that same summer. I would not have yet received my first Star Wars action figures or miniature Millenium Falcon ship or Star Destroyer until later that November for my birthday, or December for Christmas. Everything seemed to be about outer space and discovery in the summer of 1977, and would continue to be for some time, as far as I was concerned. My best friend of the time and I obsessively used to build spaceships out of Lego's in our pre-adolescent days (before they came pre-designed, with instructions, like today!), and moonbases resembling the moonbase on the futuristic television show Space: 1999 (which seemed impossibly distant in the future at the time). NASA's test shuttle Enterprise had even been named after the television series Star Trek's USS Starship Enterprise. A lifetime would feel like it had passed between the ages of 10 and 14, between Enterprise's piggy-back ride on a 747, its successful glider landing, and Columbia's historic launch into orbit and safe return through the blazing heat of free-fall re-entry in 1981.

Now, here I am in 2011 watching a replay of Discovery's final launch over this thing called the Internet (the PC was not even a household item yet in 1981!), and I feel as if another lifetime has passed since that day in my junior high school science classroom.

I felt moved as I watched Discovery's final ascent, while listening to the oddly comforting rumble of its rocket boosters escorting the shuttle to serve its final mission of "Discovery."

I watched as the camera mounted to the fuel tank showed a curving horizon, framed by an inky black and its accompanying "no-sound"...complete silence even in the separation of the fuel tank from the shuttle--as if it had moved beyond the physical world, like a reincarnated being finally breaking free from its cycle of mortality and arriving at last at Nirvana, and sending us back a transmission of what it saw...earth as one body, one spherical volume of molten core; cliff- and canyon-carved crust; colonies of ants working tirelessly, their labors riding piggy-back, as they march toward ant hills and underground ant civilizations; humans moving like ants across and through one another on city streets and avenues in New York, Shanghai, Riyadh and Buenos Aires; sprawling, automated sprinkler systems watering squares, rectangles, and circles of world crops, too far away to see from this altitude, but contemplatable through eyes of thousands of civilians peering down from passenger windows suspended somewhere between Discovery and earth at this very moment--and this morning, in the moment that two of those eyes might have been caught off guard by a vertical plume of smoke rising into the air appearing in the horizon, rising higher, above you, through the cirrus clouds, then melting into the stratosphere. And it dawns on you, this Thursday morning, that most people have never peered into the abyss of blue beneath you or beyond the darkening hues of cobalt above you.

But look--and go--NASA did.

When Discovery returns, she will return as a body, as the shell of Discovery's spirit, accompanied by pall bearer jets; but Discovery's spirit will remain "up there" with the dreams and reachings of humankind, who shall build more, and better space crafts to take us into space, to constantly move us closer and closer to unity with the mind of God, to "universe-"al knowledge.

Watching her disappear into the ether, as even the most advanced ground cameras struggled to keep her sight in their digitally-exacting motion-steadying eye pieces, was like watching the spirit of a loved one slowly slipping away from you in their final moments of dying, when you know they have moved beyond the point of no return and are already there in spirit even before their hearts have stopped and the spirit has left the body. It was like saying goodbye to someone I'd known for a very long time and for whom I'd grown to feel great affection over the years....

Discovery has not returned from space yet. But right now, I know she's up there floating, probably belly up, like I used to do in the ocean in the summers on beaches in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine; feeling weightless, disembodied from the cares of the world, a chasmic depth of mystery beneath me and a domeless, infinite blue above me. I even remember floating on a quietly bobbing sea at night one time, staring at the stars, as the shuttle crew must find itself doing every now and then on their missions.

When Shuttle Discovery's body is "shuttled" home by two or more pallbearing fighter jets, I will greet her with flowers and a kiss on the cheek, where those tiles burned each time in a trial by fire--a trial necessary for her to go through each time she returned with new knowledge, and new Discoveries to share with all of humankind.

Not every trial has been perfect. The original Columbia, seen in her maiden voyage from my junior high science class, was not able to share with us the fruits of her last labors in February of 2003. I was well into my 30's when damaged wing tiles did not withstand the intense heat upon re-entry. Columbia, our beloved original, would be no more. Challenger's accident found fault in the opposite--freezing temperatures, blamed for leaking O-ring joints in the shuttle boosters two minutes into lift-off, in January of 1986.

Did you know that if the earth were to attempt to cozy just a smidgeon closer to the sun, toward the trajectory of Venus, that we would not survive the heat; or that if we were nudged just so much further way from the sun, closer to the orbit of Mars, we would all freeze to death?

Our planet and our dreams hang in a fine balance between exuberant ecstasy and catastrophe. Thankfully, we do not have to worry about the Earth's general safety in a universe of Newtonian physics governing, so elegantly, the motion of the planets and stars; but we humans, the one imperfect creature in this universe--though paradoxically the most "advanced" that we know of--must experience trial and error in our Endeavor to reach for the stars, and trial and error to reach below, toward the source of mythology's Atlantis, into the depths of the sea (which covers more territory than Earths' dry land!).

One more matter before logging out of this "Captains Log" (in my dreams!), Stardate Feb. 24, 2011... I cannot look over one remaining detail: the role my father played in the space program. Dad worked for the original Morton Thiokol Corporation which built the space shuttle boosters, which have been escorting the shuttle into space for these last three decades. I remember accompanying my grade school class on a field trip to observe a shuttle booster test before Columbia's inaugural launch. Many of us had parents who worked for Thiokol. The mother of my best friend from 5th grade through high school was a telephone operator there. The booster was mounted firmly to the earth and the propulsion from the booster was blasted onto the desert hill side, which I remember turned black as soot. The sound was thunderous, unlike anything I had ever heard. I imagine we were much closer to the booster than viewers are allowed to stand to the shuttle when she launches from Kennedy Space Center.

When the Challenger "slipped the surly bonds of Earth" years later and blame for the accident was pinpointed, I remembered back to that day and wished, as I'm sure much of my home town did, that we could have done something to reverse the sorrow brought upon her crew's families and upon the entire nation, whose very dreams and hopes were symbolized in the ambition of the shuttle program. Only five years had passed since the first shuttle launch. Mistakes were made in making decisions about whether to fly or not. The danger was debated, but those who insisted on flying, like those who insisted on taking the Titanic full speed ahead, won out. Improvements were made in the O-ring design before the next shuttle was allowed to launch, and in the 25 years since then, the space shuttle boosters have successfully carried all five shuttles dozens of times into orbit without failure. Which reminds me: Twenty-five years is exactly half the time my dad worked as an employee for the Thiokol/ATK company, becoming the organization's longest serving employee in its history.

Nearly everything that my dad earned to give me a life free of want at the dinner table, filled with opportunities in music and education, and a modest weekly allowance so that I could go see The Empire Strikes Back, Disney's The Black Hole, or the latest incarnation of Spock's ears for the umpteenth time came from the place that courted and escorted all of our shuttle missions into space.

Thank you for your missions of discovery over the years...Columbia, Challenger, Endeavor, Atlantis,...Discovery. And thank you, Dad.



Copyright Aaron Jensen 2011


Discovery's final launch - February 24, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPkJ8ugK3_0
First shuttle test flight - Enterprise - February 18, 1977
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I8DZivcnMM

First shuttle launch - Columbia - April 12, 1981
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_PUF7DiKp8

Newtonian physics applied to the space shuttle in orbit (Thank you, Isaac Newton! b. 1642, d. 1727)
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/spacecraft/q0164.shtml

Why does the space shuttle fly belly up in space?
http://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae524.cfm