To Boldly go Where?

As a child living in Los Angeles, I remember my mother waking me up repeatedly while it was still dark, to watch a dim, 19" black and white T.V.  This didn't happen every day.  In retrospect though, it did  happen every day there was a man sitting on top of an Atlas rocket in a Mercury capsule.  This happened a great many times because although there were only a few Mercury launches, there were many many scrubbed launches...and really, I just wanted to go back to bed.

My in-laws have a Webster's Second International Dictionary from 1894.  The word "airplane" isn't in it.  One hundred years later, more than a dozen men had walked on the moon.

My wife's grandmother was alive at the time of the Wright Brother's flight off Kill Devil's Hill, near Kitty Hawk.  She also watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon.  This she did with people all over the world, including both China and the Soviet Union.

It's simply not possible to exaggerate the accomplishment.  Similarly, it's not possible to exaggerate the contribution the space program has made to our lives in everything from computers to medicine to solar cell technology to semi-conductors to vacuum pumps to hand held calculators (come and gone now) and yea verily, even Velcro.  Some of these were inventions in response to the mission while others achieved practicality only due to the extreme challenges space requires of all things human.

In my opinion, John Kennedy's legacy is usually overstated...and I'm being restrained in my criticism of his acolytes here.  However, as pertains to everything to do with the space program, from it's creation in civilian form to the framing of it's mission, he hit the ball a long long way out of the park, approximately 238,857 miles (the average distance to the moon) to name a number.

The importance of what he did is not found or limited by what he imagined the space program to be.  In fact, at the time, it was undertaken as a response to Soviet initiatives that were in play.  Regardless of original intent however, what he provided was a lightning rod that became the focus of both dreams and aspirations of people all over the world.  At some point in the mission, it ceased being yet another response to the Cold War and achieved an animating vision of it's own; the United States became the standard bearer and servant of the dreams of mankind. Again, the triumph was not in the dominance of space.  It was instead in the risk, service and sacrifice of what we were eventually able to provide for the human family.  And this is why on July 21st, 1969 we all held our breath for Neil Armstrong...and then yelled with joy.

Today's final shuttle flight isn't sad because it's the last mission for a vehicle of it's kind.  It's sad because it ratifies a loss of vision, inspiration and goals as pertains to the last frontier that has been gaining entropy for some time.  Somehow, private space ships will carry something to an orbiting platform that will do things that...well...will do things.  Then in a few years, we'll have a new rocket that will strain to match the performance of the decades old Saturn V (7,823,000 lbs of takeoff thrust) for getting men into space to...well...maybe they'll go to an asteroid.  I'm reminded of Proverbs 28:19 - "Where there is no vision, the people perish."  That is not hyperbole.

Not because we need to map vision to the practical but rather because we can:  It's vision that won WWII, eradicated Small Pox, invented electric light, conceived and built the atom bomb (note the connection to the first entry here) and...put men on the moon.  Really, it never was about a "space program" at all.

My wife and I are fortunate and occasionally "challenged" by a salient fact in our decades old relationship.  Namely, it's very nearly impossible for us to have a trivial conversation.  We virtually always speak in meaningful depth about family, friends and probably most common, our spirituality.  The other night, she challenged me that I needed to dream more and then, to actively move in the direction of my dreams.  I resisted for any number of practical reasons.  I'm afraid, this is yet another occasion where she was right and I was wrong. 

We all need the vision that is inspired by aspiration.  We need it individually and we need it corporately.  We simply will not survive without it.  I hope and pray that vision will return to our corporate exploration of the unknown.  And I hope that each one of us in turn will form and pursue individual visionary goals, so that we eventually can all take turns at the sacrifice and risk of stepping off into an unexplored reality. Everyone will be watching, and holding their breath.