Yes, that ten year old boy was me. When I was ten I watched the Space Shuttle go up from my home in Florida. Each launch we watched the shuttle shoot into the sky and with it my dreams of traveling to new worlds, to boldly go where no man had gone before... Yep, I was, and still am, a Sci-Fi nerd. Traveling to other worlds was a dream I thought could come true in my lifetime. It all seemed so possible. My parents saw men land on the moon and I watched as astronauts regularly "shuttled" into space. Unless you have experienced it, you can't image what being exposed to that type of excitement does to a young boy.
As a Gen-X'er growing up in Florida near Cape Canaveral in the age of Star Wars and Star Trek, the dream seemed like it could be a reality. Now at forty, while on vacation to my parents home in Florida, I watched a piece of my childhood launch into space, never to return again. Each time that shuttle launched I felt a piece of my childhood ride on that space ship. Unfortunately, I also got a first hand view of the tragedy on that day the Challenger exploded. (Our entire high school was outside on a bomb threat. We listened to the radio from someones car. I have never heard that kind of silence from 800 high school students.)
I knew it was significant as I watched a single tear fall from my mother, for she knew as well that it marked the end of an era, not only for our space program, but for her son as she watched him thirty years ago with such wonder in his eyes. As we watched together, three generations, as I also watched with my daughter (12) and son (3), there was something different in this launch than that one.
As one generation watched us launch into space and another watched us shuttle into space, I wonder what my children will watch. Hopefully something more than a nation dying under the weight of its own debt, or fear of terror from an unknown bomber. For there was something more as we looked up into the sky and watched the space program. The space program held dreams and a reality that there was more out there than our navel gazing, more than our arguments on Capital Hill, or trying to pay our bills. It helped us to recognize that we are not alone. That from up there we all look the same, no race, no colors. The sin and evil seem to drift away as the beauty of the our planet, the moon and stars reminds us that God is still holding it all together. That the God of the universe would love the people on that little round ball so much that he would send his son to an insignificant little town in the middle east.
So thank you NASA and so many others who help launch a young boys dreams into space. My prayer is that whatever happens in our space program, there might be a new "space ship" out there to launch the dreams of so many other boys and girls to boldly go where no one has gone before.
3 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, 4 what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? Psalm 8:2-4




