The Final Countdown

Space loomed large in my growing up. Sputnik was marvelous – who cares if the Russians did it first? I didn't as a kid. Through the fifties I devoured the books of Willy Ley, with its wonderful paintings by Chesley Bonestell, predicting and depicting the marvels of space travel "just around the corner" (inspiring that wonderful slowly rotating wheel of a space station in Kubrick's "2001"), and struggled to read Werner von Braun's technical blueprint for a mission to Mars – although Tom Lehrer, Mike Nichols and Elaine May finally set me straight on what that dude was all about!

I recall the tremendous respect I felt for Alan Sheppard when he deflected the news media's questions about his religious feelings during a Mercury voyage – that's a personal matter, he told them. However, he tarnished his image a bit in my eyes when he later played a silly game of golf on the Moon.

Youthful cynicism set in in time for the Moon shot, and from a bunk in a commune in northern New Hampshire I sneered at Walter Cronkite's enthusiastic coverage (the dear man – shame on me!). In Providence I was amused by housemates who never missed an episode of Star Trek – they sat in a large room bare except for the couch they all crowded into and a television on the floor, and cheered for Kirk and Spock and the rest. But first love eventually rekindled, and I was again taken by the glory of it. Not so much the technical achievements of NASA, although they are huge, and show us just how hard it is to satisfy the fantasy of leaving Earth; it's the backdrop, the almost appalling fact of what you see when you look upwards on a clear night. This was not lost on my daughter as a toddler; when I would pick her up and take her out to see the sky at night, she was afraid to look up.

I love the Hubble, and consider it one of NASA's finest achievements. No, it doesn't ferry adventurers here and there, or position materiel (military and otherwise) – it simply reveals to us gorgeous mysteries and vistas of places we will never be able to get to but yearn to see and understand nevertheless. By the way, the term "spherical aberration" predates NASA considerably – makers of lenses and telescopes have been dealing with it for centuries.

The shuttle program certainly should be retired, or changed. I mean, really – check for burnt tiles after each flight? An aerospace technology that depends on pottery? On a darker note, I was very angry after the Challenger disaster. How terrible to have put a young mother into harm's way like that, to have made her a victim of engineering hubris and the bureaucratic corruption exposed by Richard Feynman in his last days.

I guess a bit of the old cynicism remains – I'm sure the reason George W. Bush wants to press on to Mars is the hope he'll find the WMD there.