The space shuttle Atlantis took off a week ago. Did you notice? I won’t
blame you if you didn’t. I flipped through the news last Friday and all
I could find were pictures of a rich girl in the back of a police car. I
would have been somewhat mollified if the news had been taken up with the
botched war going on, (30% of Americans still think that the President is
doing a heckuva job. WTF?), but Paris? That just pissed me off.
On Friday, we SENT PEOPLE TO SPACE. Sure, it’s just Low Earth Orbit;
but most of us can’t find our way to the new grocery store that just
opened across town. So I think that strapping eight men and women into a
shiny brick, strapping that brick onto several tons of explosives, and
sending them into OUTER SPACE is something that should be mentioned
when it happens.
Instead, you only really hear about it when something goes wrong. Stop and
think about that last sentence. Sending people into space has become so
routine that it doesn’t even register. That right there should be heralded:
“In other news, we are still a space-faring species. We’ve conquered nature
in an unprecedented way that was almost unimaginable even a hundred years
ago. Little more than talking monkeys, we’ve extended our grasp to the stars
and proven that we can escape our terrestial prison. The universe has
taunted us with its marvels and mysteries from the day we crawled from the
ocean and gazed into the sky; now we are prepared to step into that universe and
say ‘Here we are. Show us.’”
Why isn’t something like that on TV every single day? Why can’t we rise
above our terrible wars, religious silliness, greed, and everything else
that’s holding us back and say, “We’ve really done something great. How
much farther can we go if we work together?”
I know why. It’s because we forget. We get so wrapped up in our daily
lives of working and eating and pooping and screwing and sleeping, and we
forget. We tune in to see what the latest antics of the
latest celebrity couple are, and we forget. We spend all of our energy
telling others who they are and aren’t allowed to love, and we forget. We
work hard to make enough money to buy a bigger TV than our neighbors, and
we forget.
The folks at NASA remember. And the ESA. And little children around this
globe who look through a telescope for the first time. They’re doing amazing things with very little money and constantly being asked to do more with less.
Right now, two men are walking in space. Throughout all of human history,
this is the sort of thing that we could never imagine anyone but gods
doing. Yet, there they are, suspended above our pale blue dot: just doing
their jobs.
I would plead with anyone that would listen: don’t let us stop. We’ve come
so far and accomplished so much. Let’s see what else we can do. When I
started this, I had a point; but it’s turned into a love letter to
space exploration.
And I’m okay with that.
So I’ll end this with a quote from season 2 of The West Wing (the
episode is “Galileo”) where Sam explains why we have to go to Mars:
Because it’s next. For we came out of the cave, and we looked over
the hill, and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean, and we pioneerd
the West, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on the
timeline of exploration, and this is what’s next.
