Spaced Out

Today is the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight in 1961. Many of my friends in the aerospace industry remember it; like me, they grew up in the Sixties and Seventies, watching the Russians and the Americans dueling each other in space, sending rocket after rocket up into the void. We all expected to join the ranks of the astronauts some day. Our brains were filled with the television images of Apollo, and the words and stories from the great Science Fiction writers of the day. Asimov, Bradbury, Anderson. We looked forward to building our own rockets in our garages much as our fathers built their own hot-rods in theirs.

Such was not to be.

The first disappointment was the failure of the shuttle to be completed in time to rescue Skylab in 1979. Development was taking too long. The sun got cranky and overheated the atmosphere, causing it to blossom out into space and pull the space station back to earth too soon, too soon. My dreams of visiting it came to a dramatic end when it burned up.

The first space shuttle finally orbited in 1981, the year I graduated High School. My space-fanatic friends and I spent our junior and senior years reading up on the amazing technology (in the magazines scattered around the Science Department) while waiting impatiently for the beginning of the Next Big Space Race. We knew the Russians were working on their own Space Shuttle, and imagined that soon the earth would be orbited by multiple space stations serviced by numerous space shuttles of all shapes and nationalities.

Throughout college, my intention was to learn enough engineering to get into a space-related program, to work on the rockets and computers I'd learned about in my earlier years. After graduation, I got a job at Boeing and hoped to work my way into one of those cool aerospace jobs. In the first year, I made a number of friends among those who had worked on the earlier space programs; once they learned of my dreams, they tried to help me get on those programs. And things were starting to look very good for those dreams in January of 1986.

Then things got bad again.

In the aftermath of Challenger, the space programs went into another lull, and lots of people moved on to other things. The space program eventually recovered, but things were different now. The dream of getting into space had hit the wall of reality that said you can't get there unless you are one of the lucky few, the chosen ones, and even then, the odds are stacked. There would never be the great number of flights per year they had promised; the total number of astronauts would be severely limited; the probability of being chosen out of the hundreds of thousands of willing candidates was slim. At some point, the dream sort of fizzled out due to the need to just get on with life.

There was almost the revival of the dream in the early part of this century, when it seemed that there was a possibility of work on a space-related computer system. But then there was Columbia, and that dream, too, disappeared like mist in the ensuing rounds of industry layoffs.

I received a note from a good friend of mine, an amateur radio astronomer, bemoaning the fact that we don't seem to be fulfilling all the promises of those many years ago, those promises of moonbases and Mars colonies and multi-generational, interstellar travels. We have settled for the mundane, the ordinary, the profitable, the safe. We are tied down with all the wars and tragedies and disasters of this world, so overwhelming that we often forget about our hopes for our future Up There. Suddenly all the stories, those classic stories of spacemen and rockets and heroism which filled our minds in those days of yesteryear, they all become moldy and musty like old-fashioned books in the forgotten shelves of the library. We are more interested in American Idol and Dancing with the Stars and iPods and Facebook and all the other trivialities of life which distract us from great accomplishments.

I had hoped to live in a time of great accomplishment in space, to be able to look back on my life and point to some great achievement like establishing bases on the moon or colonies on Mars and say, I helped with that. Now I can only look back and wonder: What does it feel like to be the last person to turn out the lights in the Vehicle Assembly Building, when the last space shuttle has gone off to the museum and there's nothing left to do?