The Starship Atlantis

Glimmers

July 8, 2011; the final voyage of the starship Atlantis.
Imagine that line being read by William Shatner. Imagine a truck with a cramped cab and a massive cargo trailer attached to three huge, powerful rockets and you have our beloved Space Shuttle. And today was the last one. The very last one. It is hard to imagine that.

When the first Shuttle went up on April 12, 1981, I was newly married and working as associate pastor of a church in Sanford, FL. Officially dubbed STS 1, I watched from the church parking lot as Columbia hurtled toward space. Even from that distance, it was quite impressive.

The Challenger disaster is one of those "I remember where I was when it happened" moments, like the Kennedy assassination or 9/11. We were living in Selmer, TN at the time. I was the pastor of a small church and was working as a substitute teacher at the middle school that day. All school work stopped. People sat stunned in their seats. Here in Central Florida, the grief was deeper, I’m told. The atmosphere turned from celebration to horror, and then to mourning in a matter of seconds. Here monuments to the crew remain to remind us. There are schools named after crew members McNair and McAuliffe and for the vehicle itself. Here we live surrounded by the history of Space.

I know people who were charged with going to Texas to search for pieces of Columbia in the aftermath of its breakup during re-entry in on October 15, 2003. For some the impact was akin to the PTSD that soldiers experience after combat. And yet the program endured.

With the exception of those two missions, the Shuttle has been remarkably successful. Because of the Shuttle program, we have the international space station and the Hubble telescope. And we also have microchips and MRI machines, artificial hearts and smoke detectors, LED lights and digital mammography, Mylar balloons and Kevlar vests, microwave ovens and cell phones, sports domes and football helmets. These are a few of the thousands of inventions and advancements that owe their existence to the program.

Atlantis is STS 135. 134 times we have witnessed this marvel climb into the skies, clouded in steamy vapor and shaking the earth as the sound reverberated outward from the launch pad. 132 times twin sonic booms have announced the successful completion of the assigned mission. And now we wait for it just once more.

We will miss you indeed.

Jerald