Space Dreaming

I WAS BORN at a good time to dream about space flight. When I was six, Alan Shepherd ventured into space. Fascinated, I asked my mother what he had said about it, what it was like to be in space. She told me that Mr. Shepherd was reporting that it was very dark up there. John Glenn excited me by educating me to the fact that it was possible to orbit the Earth in an hour and a half, and to do so multiple times - he did it three times - without being killed. Then, I started reading a series of children's books called "Mike Mars", about a kid named Michael Albert Robert Sampson who in one book taught me how to make a rocket out of an empty pop bottle, some baking soda, and I forget what else. Put it on roller wheels, and it would propel horizontally along the sidewalk. I never actually performed the experiment, but I dreamed about it. Mike's great dream, like mine, was to walk on Mars. Each Mercury and Gemini mission was obviously getting us closer to going to the moon. On July 20, 1969, I, a fourteen year old between eighth and ninth grade, watched Armstrong walk on the moon with my mother and sister and billions of other people, on our boxy black and white, with Cronkite. That was the summer, the summer of sixty nine, when I had my first "real" telescope, a two point four inch refractor, and twice during that summer, on July 9 and again on August 9, I spent the night at a friend's house, and we observed the heavens all night. He was going into his senior year, and had a three inch telescope, appropriately larger than mine. We called that summer "the glorious summer", not because of baseball or golf, which I did curing the day, but because of those wonderful hot nights beneath the stars, insects humming, with our telescopes, watching and dreaming. That was also the summer I saw on the big screen what is still my favorite movie of all time: "2001:A Space Odyssey". I remember my joy that I actually understood the movie, and my pride at trying to explain it, perhaps unsuccessfully, to my mom and sis. Obviously it was a bit too ambitious in predicting humankind's future in space: maybe about a hundred years too ambitious. But, as they say; its the thought that counts. Unfortunately my astronomy friend died young, but I like to think his spirit is up there, among the stars. With each return to the moon, my interest was a bit diminished; by 1972, the last time humans walked on the moon, I was heading into my senior high school year, and had other matters, the usual ones, on my mind. At first I was quite interested in the space shuttle and Skylab, but soon lost interest. It was as if we were rehearsing for nothing. In 1969, I thought that by the year 2020 I would be going back and forth between the moon, Mars, and Earth as a passenger. I fancied moon and Mars bases, and expeditions beyond the solar system. So naturally, i become disappointed, like, I suspect, many people of my generation. All of the great science fiction writers I loved as a kid, especially Asimov, Clarke, and Silverberg, piqued my fascination with the human future in space. The Viet Nam war, and other wars, diverted funds, and after Apollo Eleven, it seems that we the people simply lost our focus, that we never had a concrete plan for continuing outward. We now know that the incredible expense and technical difficulties are far more daunting than we at first believed. Yet, there is hope. There is renewed interest in space exploration, travel, and colonization, and various projects; the Hubble telescope, the Mars rovers, deep space probes heading out beyond the solar system, have all greatly increased our knowledge of the universe, and re-inspired us to exploration. I still believe that humanity will do everything I wanted so badly for us to do fifty years ago, but, alas, it will all be done much later than I would have thought or hoped. I'll be long dead when we the human species take to the off Earth universe in earnest, but I comfort myself that maybe, just maybe, when it all happens, I will have joined my telescoping buddy as a spirit in the sky, looking down on it all, and smiling contentedly.