16 minutes. That's how close they were to a safe return home. But 'the foam did it'. I was living in Yucca Valley, California and I actually had gone outside to see it overhead. The crisp air of that February morning made the sky so clear. I never saw the contrails overhead so I headed into to see it land on TV. It never did.
The previous summer I went to the NASA Ames Research Center as part of an internship. I got to see experiments that were going up on STS 107, I talked with the scientists who had invested years of their life into the research. I felt like I was somehow minutely involved with it all. And when it broke up on re-entry, I felt the loss that the NASA family shared. February 1st, 2003.
Rick Husband
Willie McCool
Mike Anderson
Ilan Ramon
Kalpana Chawla
Dave Brown
Laurel Clark
4 comments:
Thanks, Ex-Pat Nomad, for the timely memorial to our space explorers. The pictures and the lists of names move me.
I am presently re-reading Steven Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" - the illustrated version. In it is a photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope that shows the early universe, with thousands of galaxies.
The other day I was trying to talk about that photo, and about cosmology at the faculty table, and no one seemed interested. Granted, it wasn't the best time to have a deep discussion about deep space, but I felt so frustrated that no one was excited about it as I was. [I find that this happens a lot. Me getting all excited about something that most everyone else thinks is ho-hum.]
It's good to know there's someone else out there who loves space travel and our astronauts as much (or even more!) than I.
(By the way, I just realized that I have to push "refresh" in order to update your page! So, if you haven't heard from me for a while, it's because I hadn't done so, and I thought you hadn't posted for over a week!)
I'm glad to hear that I am not the only space science nerd out there. We'll have to sit down this summer in Plymouth and talk string theory and what-not over a pint at the Fresher. :)
There was a young lady of Wight
Who travelled much faster than light.
She departed one day,
In a relative way,
And arrived on the previous night.
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Can we talk about space-time, worm holes, and the theory of relativity as it applies to space travel, too? If so, drinks are on me. Then, we can "borrow" the powerpoint projector, hook it up to one of our DVD-playing laptops, and invite the rest of the tech nerds in Plymouth to watch "Contact" against a campus wall.... :-)
That is sucha cool lymric! I'll be sure to share it with my IB Physics class... :)
And yes, we'll set up the beamer and force people to watch 'Contact'. Betcha didn't even know that I have a slight addiction to it! Yuppers, every time I flip the channels, I can't pass it up. The remote seems to magically stop on that movie every single time - its beyond my control!
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