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Welcome home, Atlantis.
I'm not at all ashamed to say I watched her take-off, and her landing, with tears streaming down my cheeks. After the launch, I raised a toast to her and her five amazing sisters -- Columbia, Challenger, Endeavor, Discovery, and the one everybody overlooks... Enterprise.
I can remember being in high school and going outside before dawn one summer morning, and watching Columbia sailing overhead. She was just a bright spot of light, but she was so BEAUTIFUL! What my eyes couldn't see, my heart filled in -- that matchless black-and-white bird, with her crew of four men and the first woman ever to go to space. One extraordinary lady, carrying another, and both to be followed by more like them.
I can remember sitting in the lobby of one of the women's dormitories down at Ole Miss with my girlfriend at the time, and feeling the breath go out of me and my heart stop as Challenger dissolved into a ball of flame. My girlfriend's father was an aerospace engineer, the senior design exec for the shuttle program. If the investigations had determined that the disaster was an engineering failure, it was his head that would have been on the pike. I did a Google search for him, and found that he has passed away.
This may have been the last shuttle flight, but this is not the end of NASA. Their budgets have been screwed over for at least the past decade, but they are still going forward with development on the shuttle's replacement, the Orion MPCV (Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle) as well as exploration of deep space.
Here's to those six stately ladies... one of whom never got to leave home, and two of whom didn't get to come back.
God bless them, their crews, and all the thousands of people who lifted them into the air and into their rightful places in history.
I'm not at all ashamed to say I watched her take-off, and her landing, with tears streaming down my cheeks. After the launch, I raised a toast to her and her five amazing sisters -- Columbia, Challenger, Endeavor, Discovery, and the one everybody overlooks... Enterprise.
I can remember being in high school and going outside before dawn one summer morning, and watching Columbia sailing overhead. She was just a bright spot of light, but she was so BEAUTIFUL! What my eyes couldn't see, my heart filled in -- that matchless black-and-white bird, with her crew of four men and the first woman ever to go to space. One extraordinary lady, carrying another, and both to be followed by more like them.
I can remember sitting in the lobby of one of the women's dormitories down at Ole Miss with my girlfriend at the time, and feeling the breath go out of me and my heart stop as Challenger dissolved into a ball of flame. My girlfriend's father was an aerospace engineer, the senior design exec for the shuttle program. If the investigations had determined that the disaster was an engineering failure, it was his head that would have been on the pike. I did a Google search for him, and found that he has passed away.
This may have been the last shuttle flight, but this is not the end of NASA. Their budgets have been screwed over for at least the past decade, but they are still going forward with development on the shuttle's replacement, the Orion MPCV (Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle) as well as exploration of deep space.
Here's to those six stately ladies... one of whom never got to leave home, and two of whom didn't get to come back.
God bless them, their crews, and all the thousands of people who lifted them into the air and into their rightful places in history.
