NASA’s manned space flight program ended this year. For my generation, that was a landmark moment.
One of my earliest memories is seeing a human walking on the moon. It was around 4 am and nobody in my house slept that night. I remember looking at the moon and trying to see the two humans on the moon. My room was filled with NASA posters, my dream was to become an astronaut one day.
My school days and afternoon playtime were full of the wonder of space travel – of new planets, and new horizons.
The space age shaped all kinds of things we now take for granted.
The famous “Blue Marble” shot was the first photograph in which Earth is in full view, taken on December 7, 1972. It showed our planet and the life it carries in its fragility. This kickstarted the environment movement and increased our awareness that we’re just a small pea in an infinite soup of stars and planets.
When the Space Shuttle took off for the last time, it feels like we missed out on something very extraordinary of our human experiment. We’ll never get it back. And that saddened me deeply.
They took our last toy away and we all had to grow up too soon.
uwehook 
0 Comments