DIARY - Between the Moon and the Stars.
Date: 2005-10-31 17:11:49
Author: Pat Kent
I meant to write this a while ago.
The US recently announced that they intend to go back to the moon reinvigorating their space programme as a pre-cursor for their planned manned landings on Mars.
I suppose I remembered to resurrect this as Mars has just passed the Earth at it's closest for many a year.
I grew up during the "Space race" era and the sheer wonder and excitement of that has lived with me all my life. I grew up watching the real life adventures of real men "going boldly where no men have gone before". Real heroes, not footballers and pop stars, but explorers who showed determined courage, risking their lives to further our knowledge and push human endeavour to new boundaries.
Yes, I know that both sides were fighting for supremacy in areas like missile development so they could develop the capability to lob a nuclear warhead half way around the globe, but, that could have all been done without the human challenge of exploring the "final frontier".
Despite the military benefits, as a race the space programme has given us huge leaps in progress in areas of medicine, information technology & communication, the impact has clearly been widespread.
The co-operation since the fall of the iron curtain and communism has been tremendous, only stifled by the lack of global funding for such exploration. Now, with many other Countries leaping on the bandwagon, India, China, Japan, all with growing interest in space exploration we see a renewed interest from the biggest player to step back onto the stage they deserted in the late seventies. The new wave of explorers from the far-east, have rekindled the "Space race", hopefully it means a new beginning to mankind's interest beyond our atmosphere and not one Nation's way of rebuilding its arms industries.
The sooner NASA restart exploration beyond our own small world in partnership with all Nation's the better. I hope that it also fires the imagination of kids who like me wanted to see something more between the moon and the stars than the black space that seemed to dominate. To me too many kids these days seem to show interest only in the game boys and PSP's in their living rooms, living in some CGI fantasy in some generation X reality. I hope they wake up to look beyond the black space that seems to dominate and see something worth aiming for.
I talked to my nephew once about my heroes, not the footballer's and pop stars of my youth, but the real heroes, the Chuck Yeager's, John Glenn's, and Yuri Gagarin's of the world.
Chuck Yeager was the first man to break the sound barrier in the one-man, Bell X-1 rocket plane - It was incapable of taking off as a normal plane and was dropped from the underside of an adapted B52 bomber at high altitude - Yeager went on to brake the sound barrier after having broken 2 ribs the previous day, he didn't tell his superiors about the injuries as he feared they would scrub his attempt or pass the opportunity to another pilot.
I told my nephew about the Apollo moon missions and how my parents allowed me to stay up all night to see Armstrong and Aldrin land on the moon in 69, and how I literally followed every minute of the Apollo 13 disaster news reports, mainly on a tiny transistor radio and earpiece.
I asked him if he had heard about Apollo 13, his response was that he had seen the film. Great I thought, at least he knows of it. My disillusionment came when he seemed so convinced that it was nothing more than a fictional story. He was ten years old and had assumed it was nothing more than an edge of the seat yarn dreamt up by the Hollywood cash machine.
He took some convincing it wasn't, and that the whole world watched as Lovell, Swigert, and Haise fought their way back to Earth. So, what are the chances that the new generation will turn off the X-boxes to watch a real life spaceman from Earth put the first footprint on Mars' Very little, I presume, I just hope that I'm still alive when they go there, because I'll be watching.
Cheers,
Pat Kent
© Pat Kent 2005 - All rights reserved. Pat Kent exercises his right to be identified as the author.