…don’t ever forget that!
And don’t say “I’ll never be good”. You can become better! and one day you’ll wake up and you’ll find out how good you actually became.
「Neil deGrasse Tyson」
I missed doing this Saturday, but that doesn’t devalue these men and women’s accomplishments. On January 28th, 1986; 26 years, 3 days ago, the 7 crew members of the space shuttle Challenger lost their lives. I could not put it so eloquently as whoever wrote Ronald Reagan’s speech did, so I won’t try.
“We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together.
We’ve grown used to wonders in this century. It’s hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We’ve grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we’ve only just begun. We’re still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.
The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”
I realize I normally don’t make post like this, but I believe these individuals deserve to be recognized, if only for a day, for their amazing contributions. If you have 4.5 minutes, click the image and watch Reagan’s speech. It’s beautiful.
Christa McAuliffe is a New Hampshire icon. Her tombstone is the most simple yet beautiful piece of rock in the entire cemetery here in Concord. I visit it a few times a year, there are always pennies and pencils left by students, and there are always flowers. Always. It’s just so striking.
I remember watching it on TV when I was a kid, I remember crying because I knew exactly what happened, I remember asking my dad about the families of the astronauts, I remember being heartbroken and thinking about nothing else for weeks.
The President’s Address gets to me deeply. Great emotional words.
NASA’s 64-megapixel photo of Earth | The Verge
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’” - Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, People magazine, 8 April 1974.
