The Final Frontier

One of my earliest childhood memories is sitting on the couch with my mom watching the news coverage of the Challenger explosion. I was too young to fully grasp what was going on (I was a few weeks short of my 4th birthday at the time), but I was fascinated by the prospect of a spaceship.

I got a star chart for my birthday when I was 5. When I looked up into the night sky, I decided that one day I would go there. When my classmates would make fun of me and say that being an astronaut was only for boys, I pointed to my childhood hero, Sally Ride, to prove to them that girls could be astronauts, too.

When Discovery launched in 1988, my mom let me stay home from school to see the launch on TV. Throughout the rest of my childhood and early adulthood, I would watch every shuttle launch. I learned everything I could about outer space. I loved going to planetariums, and I loved looking through my dad's telescope.

When it became clear that I was too short to be an astronaut, I decided I would be an astronomer instead. By the time college rolled around, I had changed my mind and decided to become a lawyer, but I was still fascinated by space. I worked in the astronomy lab on campus and was a teaching assistant in the introductory astronomy class.

While I was a TA, my class was following the experiments onboard the shuttle Columbia. I remember waking up on the day it was supposed to land, turning on the radio, and hearing the tragic news that the shuttle had burned up on reentry. The mood in class that week was somber as we considered the sacrifices that people have made for the advancement of human knowledge.

Around this time, civilian space flight was starting to look like a viable possibility for more than just a few super rich people who could afford to pay the Russians millions of dollars. I decided that one day, when the price gets lower, I would still live my dream of going to the stars.

When the space shuttle fleet was retired last year, it felt like the end of an era. Then this summer, Sally Ride and Neil Armstrong both passed away. Today was the final flight of the final space shuttle, Endeavour, before it goes to its resting place in a museum. The shuttle did a flyover of the SF Bay Area, so I walked outside to say goodbye to such a huge piece of my childhood.

I took a few pictures:

Endeavour over Mountain View, CA

Endeavour over Mountain View, CA

I hope that even though there will be no more space shuttle flights, that we will still continue to reach for the heavens, so that the sacrifices of the crews of Challenger and Columbia will not have been in vain.

Ad astra!