So. Farewell then, the Space Shuttle
Posted by Science Oxford on May 19, 2011 | comments
I remember when the Space Shuttle was young.
I was young, too.
A friend of mine had been to Cape Canaveral on holiday and brought me back some souvenirs that you can buy to commemorate different missions. The “patch” from the second flight is the picture attached to this article – it rings a bell now that I look at it 30 years later… this website tells me that must have been late in 1981. I’d have been 8…
For a while I followed the whole thing quite closely, and I distinctly remember Challenger doing something most unusual when it took off in 1986 – it would have been early evening in the UK so I suppose I must have been watching TV after I got home from school. Maybe it was on because of the whole school teacher thing… I was watching it with my mum, I think – I remember seeing the replay and saying “look, that bit there, maybe that’s the cockpit and they’re all safe in there”. She’s not a sentimental woman, my mother, so I suspect that she told me they were all dead and to stop kidding myself. I may be doing her a disservice.
Because the Space Shuttle became a victim of its own success – despite going rather spectacularly wrong again in 2003 – you sometimes forget that being booted up into space by an enormous firework is still a very risky business indeed. I’ll get a feel for it when I meet my first ever astronaut: Dr Mamoru Mohri is coming to Science Oxford on 31 May… he runs a science centre in Tokyo and so this is a working visit, but he has agreed to do a talk for us as well. This is a man who has spent nearly 20 days in space…
I don’t remember the name of the friend who went to Cape Canaveral (Scott Bolton, was it you?), and over the last 30 years my youthful wide-eyed fascination with the space programme has become a more cynical cost-of-everything-value-of-nothing attitude. But the ending of the Shuttle programme does take me back to being 8 years old, and having Space Shuttle stickers on the table next to my bed…
What do you think?