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The Last Landing
Jul. 21st, 2011 09:48 amWith much to-do in the news yesterday about record heat in my region, I found myself sleeping uncomfortably and waking up very early. I did, though, manage to turn that into an opportunity by going to the official NASA site to see streaming video of space shuttle Atlantis landing in pre-dawn darkness. Had a delay been necessary for it to take place in daylight (or even for the landing to take place out at Edwards Air Force Base one last time), that might have been different, but things did work out.
During these final missions, I kept thinking "anything could still happen--just bring them home safe," but I could also admit that might have been a way to keep from dwelling on a sense of things coming to an end. At the same time, though, I kept thinking that with the SpaceX Falcon 9 and Dragon system having completed an unmanned test flight, there's at least the beginning of a path forward to "something else" (and that manages to brush over, as many seem to, the question of whether it's not that much of a bad thing to travel to the former Soviet Union and launch in Soyuz capsules). Still, aware of how I kept worrying about the unanticipated, I sort of find myself wanting to be skeptical of the idea that SpaceX's designs are "magically" safer because they're "designed by private industry." So far as "sending cameras to take pictures" goes (although that doesn't seem to be the only thing to do in space for me), too, I find myself thinking of the first closeups of Vesta and the discovery of a fourth moon circling Pluto.
I suppose that as this particular end approaches, I was thinking in an odd way of an "alternative history" that "wouldn't change anything," in which the final landing that will send the third surviving orbiter to a third museum is taking place, and the space shuttle landing is Challenger...
During these final missions, I kept thinking "anything could still happen--just bring them home safe," but I could also admit that might have been a way to keep from dwelling on a sense of things coming to an end. At the same time, though, I kept thinking that with the SpaceX Falcon 9 and Dragon system having completed an unmanned test flight, there's at least the beginning of a path forward to "something else" (and that manages to brush over, as many seem to, the question of whether it's not that much of a bad thing to travel to the former Soviet Union and launch in Soyuz capsules). Still, aware of how I kept worrying about the unanticipated, I sort of find myself wanting to be skeptical of the idea that SpaceX's designs are "magically" safer because they're "designed by private industry." So far as "sending cameras to take pictures" goes (although that doesn't seem to be the only thing to do in space for me), too, I find myself thinking of the first closeups of Vesta and the discovery of a fourth moon circling Pluto.
I suppose that as this particular end approaches, I was thinking in an odd way of an "alternative history" that "wouldn't change anything," in which the final landing that will send the third surviving orbiter to a third museum is taking place, and the space shuttle landing is Challenger...