Boom!! Boom! Like most people in Southwest Florida this morning, the twin sonic booms of the shuttle Atlantis passing overhead got my day off to a great but nostalgic start. As a bonus, the International Space Station (ISS) was silently gliding by in the pre-dawn sky off to the east (and no, you can’t see the shuttle as it goes over from here: it’s too high up, it’s too cool to glow, and it has no running lights or engine exhaust to form a contrail). All in all, it was a marvelous way to start a day.
So congratulations to the crew of Atlantis and to the thousands of people at NASA who made these final shuttle missions successful. Although it’s painful to see the shuttle program end, the shuttle technology is over 30 years old and we need to usher in a new era of space travel for the future.
I find myself thinking about the past this morning, remembering that I was in Tampa on business over the weekend that the first shuttle launched. I briefly toyed with the idea of driving over to the Cape to watch it go up, but being in traffic with literally a million other people that had the same idea didn’t appeal to me. When my wife and I moved to Naples in 2007, I was delighted to discover that, on a clear day, we could see the shuttle launches from here. We did make the pilgrimage to the Cape in May of 2008 to watch Discovery lift off, and even though we were ten miles away it was magnificent. (Although I did get to watch a Saturn 1 liftoff in the Skylab era, I will always regret not ever visiting Florida for the liftoff of one of the Saturn V moon rockets.) Of course everyone alive at the time remembers where they were when the shuttle Challenger was destroyed: I happened to also be traveling on business, in Ottawa, Canada. When Columbia broke up on reentry, I was watching the coverage live at my home in Kansas. Spaceflight is inherently dangerous, and I salute the dedication and bravery of those lost.
I’m also somewhat nostalgic for an entirely different reason: This week marks the one-year anniversary of my first blog entry on The Circuit. Over the last 12 months, I’ve been delighted to have the opportunity to express my thoughts and opinions on social media, social networking, and other things that have interested me or annoyed me at the time. I’d like to thank all of you for reading this blog, and let you know that I’m even more excited to be able to continue blogging here and elsewhere for the foreseeable future.
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