I was born just before the space age on May 11, 1957.
Then, the Soviet Union-launched Sputnik began transmitting on October 4, 1957; four months and seven days after my birth. This event was well-presented in the turn-of-the-century movie, “October Sky”. Coalwood, West Virginia was nine hundred and seventy-seven miles away from me, and Homer Hickam was fourteen years older than me (they obviously messed with the age of the character and the actor!)
As a child, I missed most of the early development of space exploration. But on July 20, 1969,
two months after my 12th birthday, I was “born again” into space.
I watched, with my own eyes, the televised landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon at 20:17 UTC, though I’d have more easily recognized the time as (15:17 military time, or most likely as 3:17 pm CDT) when the Eagle landed.
After the landing, everyone at the Daly house (Mom and Dad’s friends) either sat around talking (Dad and Mr. Daly); while the moms started supper; the kids played ball, and hide-and-seek (Mike and me hide under the bunk bed – no idea why we’d pick such a dusty place!), and just messed around until supper.
The climax, the TRUE purpose of the Moon Landing was to happen six hours later at 9:56 CDT: Neil Armstrong was going to walk on the Moon. As he came down the ladder, he said the words that STILL bring tears to my eyes: “One small step for Man; one giant leap for Mankind.”
Shortly after the landing, I ran outside to look up at the waxing crescent Moon, hoping I’d see the Command Module orbiter. The sky was clear at 10:56 that night, but no matter how much I squinted (we didn’t have anything like binoculars!), I couldn’t see it…
Not long after that, I discovered my first science fiction books in Birch Grove Elementary’s library, which you can read about here if you’re so inclined (https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2016/09/possibly-irritating-essay-gateway.html). This one and SPACESHIP UNDER THE APPLE TREE by Louis Slobodkin started my love story with science fiction. Heinlein, Norton, and Nourse, and countless others continued.
But what excited me most was that SPACE EXPLORATION continued as well!
The first real space station, Russia’s Salyut 1 fascinated me. Then, suddenly, amazement set in: on March 3, 1972, shortly before my 15th birthday, NASA launched the Pioneer 10 space probe with the stated mission of flying past Jupiter and taking pictures of it. It flew off with this plaque attached to it: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f5/Pioneer10-plaque_tilt.jpg/220px-Pioneer10-plaque_tilt.jpg
While its mission, to fly by and photograph Jupiter was amazing, to me, what was most exciting to me as a teen, was that it was the first serious public acknowledgement that maybe, just maybe, there might be aliens “out there”! Also, the summer I graduated from high school, there was the very first international, crewed space mission. The Soviet Union and the US spacecraft, a Soyuz and an Apollo craft actually linked up. STAR TREK had long been off-the-air, though resurrected in re-runs, but there were no new shows, and no movies. THIS was real-life international cooperation: “The project, and its memorable handshake in space, was a symbol of détente between the two superpowers during the Cold War, and it is generally considered to mark the end of the Space Race, which had begun in 1957 with the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik 1.”
Then things started to accelerate. In 1975, I graduated from high school and started college, and the Soviet Union not only orbited Venus in October 1975, it landed and took the first successful photos from the surface of another planet (Venus). In April of the US Bi-Centennial, the US/West German spacecraft, Helios 2 did the closest flyby of the Sun, and in 1976, the Viking Lander took the f irst successful photos and soil samples from the surface of Mars.
In March of 1979, Voyager 1 did a Jupiter flyby and took totally spectacular pictures of the five Jovian moons, followed closely by Pioneer 11’s Saturn flyby where it took the first photographs of Titan from space. Voyager 1 followed by doing a Saturn flyby and did a close encounter with Titan as well as dozens of other Saturn’s moons.
Dozens more names hit the headlines – SkyLab, roaring into the 1980s with the first and hundreds of consecutive flights of the Space Shuttles, starting on April 12, 1981; Venera 13
1982 saw the first mixed gender crew aboard space station, and in 1984, the first woman, Svetlana Savitskaya, to walk in space, on space station Salyut 7; 1983 saw international cooperation for the First Infrared Orbital observatory between the US, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Pioneer 10 continued to fly farther from Earth taking pictures of Neptune (first spacecraft to pass beyond all Solar System planets). In 1985, the Soviet Union deployed the first balloon deployed on another planet (Venus).In 1986, Voyager 2 flew past Uranus.
I was sleeping because I was a night supervisor at a home for the physically and mentally and had gotten off at 9 am. Seventy-three minutes after the launch of the Space Shuttle CHALLENGER, it exploded, killing all of the crew, including the first Teach in Space, Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher. One of my best friends called me, waking me up, and after taking my portable TV out from under the table where I kept it, I watched the replay a hundred times, unable to fathom it.
The space program came to a screeching halt. It resumed some two-and-half years later, after interminable changes, finger-pointing, and calls to stop sending people into space – because “We should be spending that money on our own people, not throwing it into space! What a WASTE of perfectly good money!”
The 80s and 90s were amazing years with the Soviet Mir space station, Soviet comet landing and the ESA’s comet closeup in 1986; the first exoplanet discovered (the discover was retracted, then confirmed in 2002) in 1987. Radar images of Venus, the Hubble Space Telescope, Galileo’s imaged of Jupiter, Sojourner’s roving all over the surface of Mars in 1997 (I was at a Nobel Conference that year, and they had LIVE video from Mars. I wept realizing I would never be able to go into space…and lest you say, “You don’t know that!”
I, in fact DO have proof that I will never go into space from NASA in 2009! (Blogger won't let me insert it here, but see my NASA rejection letter below...)
I watched, with my own eyes, the televised landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon at 20:17 UTC, though I’d have more easily recognized the time as (15:17 military time, or most likely as 3:17 pm CDT) when the Eagle landed.
After the landing, everyone at the Daly house (Mom and Dad’s friends) either sat around talking (Dad and Mr. Daly); while the moms started supper; the kids played ball, and hide-and-seek (Mike and me hide under the bunk bed – no idea why we’d pick such a dusty place!), and just messed around until supper.
The climax, the TRUE purpose of the Moon Landing was to happen six hours later at 9:56 CDT: Neil Armstrong was going to walk on the Moon. As he came down the ladder, he said the words that STILL bring tears to my eyes: “One small step for Man; one giant leap for Mankind.”
Shortly after the landing, I ran outside to look up at the waxing crescent Moon, hoping I’d see the Command Module orbiter. The sky was clear at 10:56 that night, but no matter how much I squinted (we didn’t have anything like binoculars!), I couldn’t see it…
Not long after that, I discovered my first science fiction books in Birch Grove Elementary’s library, which you can read about here if you’re so inclined (https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2016/09/possibly-irritating-essay-gateway.html). This one and SPACESHIP UNDER THE APPLE TREE by Louis Slobodkin started my love story with science fiction. Heinlein, Norton, and Nourse, and countless others continued.
But what excited me most was that SPACE EXPLORATION continued as well!
The first real space station, Russia’s Salyut 1 fascinated me. Then, suddenly, amazement set in: on March 3, 1972, shortly before my 15th birthday, NASA launched the Pioneer 10 space probe with the stated mission of flying past Jupiter and taking pictures of it. It flew off with this plaque attached to it: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f5/Pioneer10-plaque_tilt.jpg/220px-Pioneer10-plaque_tilt.jpg
While its mission, to fly by and photograph Jupiter was amazing, to me, what was most exciting to me as a teen, was that it was the first serious public acknowledgement that maybe, just maybe, there might be aliens “out there”! Also, the summer I graduated from high school, there was the very first international, crewed space mission. The Soviet Union and the US spacecraft, a Soyuz and an Apollo craft actually linked up. STAR TREK had long been off-the-air, though resurrected in re-runs, but there were no new shows, and no movies. THIS was real-life international cooperation: “The project, and its memorable handshake in space, was a symbol of détente between the two superpowers during the Cold War, and it is generally considered to mark the end of the Space Race, which had begun in 1957 with the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik 1.”
Then things started to accelerate. In 1975, I graduated from high school and started college, and the Soviet Union not only orbited Venus in October 1975, it landed and took the first successful photos from the surface of another planet (Venus). In April of the US Bi-Centennial, the US/West German spacecraft, Helios 2 did the closest flyby of the Sun, and in 1976, the Viking Lander took the f irst successful photos and soil samples from the surface of Mars.
In March of 1979, Voyager 1 did a Jupiter flyby and took totally spectacular pictures of the five Jovian moons, followed closely by Pioneer 11’s Saturn flyby where it took the first photographs of Titan from space. Voyager 1 followed by doing a Saturn flyby and did a close encounter with Titan as well as dozens of other Saturn’s moons.
Dozens more names hit the headlines – SkyLab, roaring into the 1980s with the first and hundreds of consecutive flights of the Space Shuttles, starting on April 12, 1981; Venera 13
1982 saw the first mixed gender crew aboard space station, and in 1984, the first woman, Svetlana Savitskaya, to walk in space, on space station Salyut 7; 1983 saw international cooperation for the First Infrared Orbital observatory between the US, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Pioneer 10 continued to fly farther from Earth taking pictures of Neptune (first spacecraft to pass beyond all Solar System planets). In 1985, the Soviet Union deployed the first balloon deployed on another planet (Venus).In 1986, Voyager 2 flew past Uranus.
I was sleeping because I was a night supervisor at a home for the physically and mentally and had gotten off at 9 am. Seventy-three minutes after the launch of the Space Shuttle CHALLENGER, it exploded, killing all of the crew, including the first Teach in Space, Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher. One of my best friends called me, waking me up, and after taking my portable TV out from under the table where I kept it, I watched the replay a hundred times, unable to fathom it.
The space program came to a screeching halt. It resumed some two-and-half years later, after interminable changes, finger-pointing, and calls to stop sending people into space – because “We should be spending that money on our own people, not throwing it into space! What a WASTE of perfectly good money!”
The 80s and 90s were amazing years with the Soviet Mir space station, Soviet comet landing and the ESA’s comet closeup in 1986; the first exoplanet discovered (the discover was retracted, then confirmed in 2002) in 1987. Radar images of Venus, the Hubble Space Telescope, Galileo’s imaged of Jupiter, Sojourner’s roving all over the surface of Mars in 1997 (I was at a Nobel Conference that year, and they had LIVE video from Mars. I wept realizing I would never be able to go into space…and lest you say, “You don’t know that!”
I, in fact DO have proof that I will never go into space from NASA in 2009! (Blogger won't let me insert it here, but see my NASA rejection letter below...)
After that – the US, European Union, Russia, Japan, and Canada initiated the orbital reign of the International Space Station in November of 1998. Cassini went to Saturn and dropped a probe on Titan between October of 1997 and September of 2017; Japan landed a probe on an asteroid (Hayabbusa), India found ice on the Moon (Chandrayaan), the ESA landed a probe on a COMET! in 2014, the US photographed PLUTO in 2015, China landed on the far side of the Moon in 2019, and Captain Kirk finally managed to leave Iowa and REALLY make it into space a few months ago…
For me, these are the defining moments of my dream of going into space. The dream of ACTUALLY doing it really died on June 30, 2009; but I continue to go into space in my imagination – and I can ALWAYS hope some descendant of mine will eventually get off the surface of Earth and into REAL space…
Resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_exploration, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_space_exploration, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo%E2%80%93Soyuz,
Image: https://i0.wp.com/cheapshottees.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Space.png?fit=500%2C500&ssl=1
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