Hail Columbia!

Twenty five years ago, on April 12, 1981, the space shuttle Columbia, crewed by John Young and Bob Crippen blasted off from Kennedy Space Center launch pad 49b. I watched it live on TV. I will never forget the the feeling of my heart racing as that incredibly large plume of steam errupted from the pad. I can remember how the shuttle and it's twin pair of solid rocket boosters, strapped to a then still white external fuel tank, pushed through that cloud, rising up on an billowing orange tower of flame. I had visited the Cape a year earlier and had seen the massive tracked crawlers that were used to carry the Apollo Saturn V's and were now destined to carry every shuttle to their launch pads from the huge vehicle assembly building. I started cutting and saving newspaper articles on the shuttle 25 years ago today. I did so for over a decade until it seemed no one cared again about space flight and everyone seemed to take this incredibly dangerous and complex business as granted and routine. I stopped collecting articles when they stopped writing about the shuttle. My granmother, who turnes 90 on the 22nd of this month, was living in Florida during those years and sent me post cards from many launches. I still have everyone of them. I still have the yellowed and dried copies of those news stories and with every launch, the articles got smaller and smaller. As we all know or might guess, it wan't until the Challenger accident that the media started covering the shuttle in earnest again. After the original return to flight, the world seemed to get board again, despite the many missions to Mir and the construction of the International Space Station. Again, most media would fall silent when another thunderous launch would take place while we were building the stepping stones to the stars, albeit in low-earth orbit, right above our heads. I've never seen a launch live though I've wanted to. While living in Austin, Texas I did see Columbia race across the blackened night time sky during reenty and watch it's incredible plasma trail light up the sky like some unearthly band of glowing silver, arched across the heavens. It would be years later when that spectale turned nightmarish as Columbia, that first spaceborne shuttle would breakup over Texas and again make us remember what made those men and women, those audacious explorers, so great to so many of us. I've gotten use to most of the world not paying attention to what's happening above their heads, down at the Cape or in that hot, humid town known simply as "Houston". While we sit here today, the first Brazilian astronaut circles the globe aboard the ISS and across a great void on the Red Planet, Spirit and Opportunity continue to amaze and capture my imagination as they send back their incredible treasure trove of photos of that cold and dry world known as Mars. Mary Odyssey continues its beaming back incredible images of the surface features of Mars and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter started sending the first hires photos of Mars back to Earth. The Venus Express is rushing towards Venus... there's more. So much more.
It's a legacy that is flawed, at times mismanaged, underfunded, misunderstood and almost always, under appriciated. But there's hope. Just ask my son what he wants to be when he grows up...