My Month in Space

My class' version of the Beloit College Mindset List would include, "Man has always visited the moon." Neil and Buzz's small steps and giant leaps occurred several years before my own earth landing. But from what I recall, I first became aware of space exploration in July 1979.

The occasion was the unfortunate demise of NASA's SkyLab. Living in a provincial town in the Philippines, my friends and their families were distraught that refrigerator-sized pieces of SkyLab would be falling from the sky and destroy their life's possessions. Though I didn't want anyone or thing to be harmed, I was VERY disappointed when my parents informed me that the debris field was limited to the Indian Ocean.

Other than such doomsday predictions we received no other information about the achievements in exploration, so my fascination was flying with the rockets when I was introduced to the Space Shuttle during home service. I was a Shuttle wanna-be through and through and have ever since Walter Mitty-ed through many a day making go/no-go decisions as if I were at the Flight Director's console in Mission Control or flipping switches and declaring "We're venting something into space" as a Command Module Pilot in full problem solving mode. Having dreamt of filling such roles, the past month of so may be the closest I'll ever come to space.

I pulled the book, Apollo 13 off the shelf for the umpteenth time back in March or April and after I got through a couple of chapters I decided to go find the accounts of other NASA personnel. I started with Gene Cranz's book, Failure Is Not An Option. That was closely followed by the Discovery Channel's series, When We Left Earth and then In The Shadow of the Moon. And just this week, I finished Michael Collins' Carrying the Fire. All of these accounts made the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions as real as the Shuttle missions I often monitor live via NASA TV's web stream.

Their reality contrasted with my fantasy exposed me for the astronaut God never intended me to be. And while weightlessness always sounded like a freeing sensation the few seconds I experienced it during a recent flight made it very apparent that I'm very comfortable with my feet on the ground and in the confines of a 1g environment.

It's been a fun month in space. From the early risk takers to seeing the latest module, Kibo, added to the International Space Station. I eagerly anticipate my next visit to the Air and Space Museum.