Hilary Booth... of course!

And my connections to Columbia continue to show up in unexpected ways. I learned to my sorrow that one of the lost astronauts, David Brown, mission specialist, was a graduate of my high school in Arlington. The Washington Post profile on Brown even says he carried a flag from the school on board.

Last night, trying to find some solace where I could, I dug out my old space filk tape "Minus Ten and Counting". The tape is filled with songs about the space exploration and space race, recorded before Challenger was probably even named, much less synonymous with space disaster. I remembered "Fly Columbia" but I had forgotten the lines from Jordin Kare's "Fire in the Sky" describing Columbia:

"Came a shuttle named Columbia, to open up the way.
And they said she's just a truck, but she's a truck that's aiming high.
See her big jets burning, see her fire in the sky."

The song was later updated for the Challenger disaster, intended to be included on an album for the National Space Society. The album also includes Leslie Fish's "Hope Eyrie" which I quoted in my last entry. A song about the moon landing, "Hope Eyrie" also had the honor of being played as a wake up call for the astronauts on one mission.

I hadn't watched television at all yesterday. I hadn't known that Buzz Aldrin had quoted part of the song until reading Peggy Noonan's column in the Wall Street Journal. For me, it had just seemed right for the moment to hear those songs. Obviously I was not alone.

I've been interested in the space program for as long as I can remember. The following will date myself nicely and I don't care. My parents grew up with the moon race, but I'm from the shuttle generation. My mother recalls being in school and informed not to change classes so Shepard or Glenn could go safely into space. I remembered being a sophomore in high school hearing that "something" had happened to the shuttle. That something was Challenger. I remembered the shuttle launch after Challenger when everyone watched numb-knuckled hoping upon hope. I went to Space Camp/Academy for two summers, flying on the Columbia team.

Now my parents have moved to the Space Coast. They were watching the last Endeavour landing on the NASA channel when they heard the twin boom. Yes, that was the shuttle landing not quite in their backyard. We visited the Kennedy Space Center today which is an impressive place, drawing several million visitors a year. And all several million seemed to be there today! The lines were long and the Florida weather was brisk and windy. By some coincidence, the next shuttle was on the launch pad ready to go up in January. The shuttle was my old friend Columbia. Unfortunately the lookout point didn't give a really good view of the orbiter, just a little orange bit of the solid rocket booster sticking up. The Apollo Center was much more interesting with the massive Saturn V rocket and presentations on Apollo VIII's launch and Apollo XI's moon landing. Mom and I had forgotten how many problems the moon lander had encountered during that trip. Usually history books remember they landed on the moon, not how many times they lost radio or computer contact.

Over dinner, we talked about what had happened with the space race. Dad honestly thinks that they lost something when they got to the moon. We send up the shuttle but nothing seems to come of it. The moon has been forgotten, although the Chinese are talking about going. I pointed out the Hubble telescope and other scientific discoveries, but he was right. We weren't trying to explore new planets, sending little drones and robots. My own thought was that Kennedy gave them one goal to the moon, but no one thought to extend that further to the next goal. After you've scaled the mountain, where do you go from there?

Oddly tonight, I'm wishing I could watch Apollo 13 again.