Space

Ok, my thoughts are flying rather quickly right now so I’m not sure what will come out. I hope you can follow this reasoning.

I just watched the launch of STS 133, the final mission of the space shuttle Discovery. There are only two more shuttle missions left involving the other shuttles, but for Discovery, this is it.

Picture is not from today's launch, this is from the New York Times.

How many more times will we reach out into space?

This school year I’ve been working in a genetics lab. We use herbicides to induce mutations in a genus of wildflower Penstemon. My job is to take the genetically mutated plants and seeds and grow them. I spend hours with tweezers counting seeds and carefully moving germinated seeds into individual soil cube so they can grow. I watch as 30% of my seeds, or more, fail to germinate. I watch as 60% of the seeds that do germinate then die before opening their first leaf. Then I observe those tiny plants undergo treatment with our herbicide and the numbers that die as time carries the poison through them. It is perhaps as few as 20 or 30 plants out of every 200 seeds that survives to be planted in the greenhouse. Only a handful of them, if any, will be planted in a field someday when the snow permits planting.

Every day I inspect my troop of plants as they reach out from the soil or agar or paper towel where the seed was placed. The eager green leaves yearn for the light, indeed they will follow it in whatever direction it is coming from. Stretching, forcing the plant to extend it’s stock and produce more leaves. They are young and vigorous, the very essence of hope.

But sometimes they die. They stop reaching for light and get droopy. Their leaves get closer and closer to the soil until they are touching. Contact with the ground leads to infections from the untold concourses of bacteria and fungus that inhabit our lab. Only by striving for the light and forcing them selves ever taller can they survive those first few days.

For the last couple thousand years mankind was like those plants. We have been pushing ourselves forward with every ingenuity we could muster. We have been pushing the boundaries of knowledge, of speed, of communication, of endurance. The Space program has perhaps been the largest most impressive of these feats. Man, encased in a SWKT-sized metal box, was rocketing to untold distances.

A picture of the actual liftoff today at 2:50 pm (Utah Time) From NASA

I have only seen two shuttle launches live in my lifetime, and those only via television. The experience is always overwhelming. To me the shuttle is the pinnacle of man’s reach into the unknown. Everything we yearn for; in society, in space, in technology, in soul; is encapsulated by that orange fuel tank with it’s twin engines. Today 6 people, 6 individual members representing all of us, left earth to reach for heaven. There is something incredibly powerful about that. Yes, I tuned out a class on using the library for research in order to stream the HD onto my computer. Maybe I distracted the two people siting next to me but someday I will be able to tell my children that I remember when man went to space. Maybe for them the Space Shuttle will be dinosaurs that were graceless and expensive but maybe they will be viewed as space age Colombian caravels speeding us to a new world. I certainly hope that we, as a species and as individuals, don’t have to become one of the 90% of my seeds that never makes it to the sunlight. Let’s keep reaching for the stars.