I'm a child of the 60's---I grew up watching every space flight I could, and have many childhood memories of watching takeoffs and splashdowns, gazing awestruck at moon landings. I would always run outside at night and look up at the moon, to see if I could see footprints. I still can't seem to take it for granted. The awe has never left me--I still try to watch shuttle takeoffs and landings, follow with great fascination the data returned from the Hubble Space Telescope and the experiments on the shuttle, and am truly amazed at the "multi-national erector set" that is the International Space Station.
So yesterday was hard. As hard as the day 17 years ago as I taught a class at AT&T and watched the Challenger explode, and as scary as the evening 19 years earlier when a confused seven year-old heard about three brave men who died in a launch pad fire as the Apollo program was just beginning. It's eerie to think of the shuttle as debris raining down in East Texas, gut-wrenching to imagine the final moments of the crew, and sobering to realize once again, how fleeting is our time here.
