Live from Austin!

Someone with a new Nikon digital SLR took a bunch of photos of the Space Shuttle as it rolled out to the launch pad from the Vehicle Assembly Building.

Sheesh, that thing looks skanky, the right side looks like a model that someone’s spilt coffee on. Now I understand what they mean by “ageing shuttle fleet”. I’m not sure I’d want to fly in it.

There are more photos posted at keyhole.com, but what really jolted me awake there was the photo showing the Shuttle from space (third on that page). If that’s what civilian satellites can do, the NSA can probably spot whether your shoelaces are untied.

I’m not sure I can explain why space travel means so much to me.

One of my earliest memories is of sitting with my grandfather, watching one of the Apollo moon landings on TV. I’m not sure which one, but since the Lunar Rover was involved it must have been one of the later ones. I would watch Sci Fi TV shows with him as well. “UFO”, in particular, and sometimes “Dr Who” if it wasn’t too scary.

Later I began reading SF, starting with Arthur C. Clarke. By then “Space:1999” was on TV, and soon I read the novel of “2001”. I remember working out how old I would be in the year 2000. With some delight, I calculated that I would be the right age to be one of the people working on the moonbase. So that became my plan.

I learnt everything I could about the space program. I collected books about astronomy, and books with diagrams of how rocket engines worked. I learned about relativity, zero gravity, orbits, black holes, red shifts and how zero gravity bathrooms worked, all before I’d got as far as trigonometry at school. I memorized the sequence of vehicle maneuvers for an Apollo moon landing. I studied souvenir brochures from the Kennedy Space Center, with pictures of the Vehicle Assembly Building, Skylab, Soyuz, Gemini, and the Angry Alligator.

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