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Astronauts!



When I was a little kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. That is not a terribly unique thing. A lot of kids my age wanted to be astronauts. The Space Race was in its infancy. The president had declared we would get a man to the moon by the end of the 1960’s (a target which sent the experts into a mad scramble to figure out how they were going to do that).

America went Astronaut crazy and it was reflected in our popular culture.  I Dream of Jeannie was one of the most popular shows of its time. I watched it not because it had a beautiful genie that could do magic, but because the two main non-magical characters were astronauts (okay, maybe part of it was because of the beautiful genie). Another TV show It’s About Time features two astronauts who go through a time warp and get stuck in the stone age. Even Gilligan’s Island had episodes featuring astronauts and cosmonauts. 

I was into model building when I was a kid so of course I had models of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo rockets. Did every kid my age have those models, no, but I did because I was going to be an astronaut!

I remember that I could recite all of the astronaut’s names. Hey, some kids could tell you every player on the Yankees; nerdy kids like me could name all the astronauts. I remember that my favorite was Gus Grissom. I can’t tell you even now why he was my favorite. Maybe I just liked the name. I remember being devastated when Gus Grissom died along with Ed White and Roger Chaffee in the Apollo 1 fire. It was one of those moments in childhood when you realize that not everything is always going to work out for the best, that there is such a thing as tragedy.

By 1968 Apollo was back up and running. When Apollo 8 sent back a picture of Earth rising over the moon it was a seminal moment in our collective consciousness. It was Christmas Eve 1968. For a moment we all saw ourselves on a fragile globe without borders. If only the moment had lasted . . . .

Then in 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon (lest we forget the contribution of Michael Collins who maintained the Command Module while they were down there) and the whole world went wild with celebration. It was not just a USA thing. Humanity had reached another world. It was something everyone from every country could celebrate. But then after a couple of more missions to the moon, America lost interest. We had beat the Russians so everyone was like “been there, done that.” Funding got cut, and that was that. NASA concentrated on Robotic missions, and Skylab and the development of the Space Shuttle. These were less costly endeavors than going to the moon. I really can’t speak for children of the 1970’s, 80’s, or 90’s, but I doubt if many of them followed the astronaut corps like we did in the 60’s. Lots of shuttle missions went up with a whole new batch of astronauts. Some of those missions did some interesting and important things, but it lacked the pizazz of going to the moon. I would like to see us explore Mars and other places, but at this point I think it all needs to be done internationally. It is just too expensive for any one country to do on its own.

The picture above is of Judy Resnik and another astronaut that I don’t recognize. I wanted to show a picture of a female astronaut because women have traditionally been underrepresented in the space program (as they have everywhere else). Judy Resnik was the second American woman in space (after Sally Ride), and later died in the Challenger disaster. Which just goes to show you, when you look at the Challenger disaster, the Columbia disaster, the Apollo 1 disaster, whether you are male or female it takes a hell of a lot of guts to go into space. I am not sure that is something my six year-old self fully appreciated.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an ebook through Copypastapublishing.com, or the other usual online sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback will be out soon).

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