Reflections On A Dream

It all ended with a flawless touchdown at KSC. 

As a member of GenX, I come from the generation whose adolescence was shaped by the profound imagery of shuttle launches; in addition, being an Air Force brat placed me in a subgroup of people who were profoundly moved by the subtler but nonetheless technically staggering set of processes that had to execute perfectly for safe landings. After Challenger, and even moreso after Columbia, launches and landings never again were "routine" in the way they had become during those few golden years in the mid-1980s.

Coming to terms with the fact that there will be no more shuttle launches is, in a word, surreal. As I sit on my couch in the San Francisco Bay Area writing these words in the wee hours of a summery July morning, I can still vividly remember that early afternoon over 30 years ago at my elementary school in North Carolina when the entire school watched the first landing... in an exotic far-off locale called California. My mind is swimming between multiple levels of irony.

I could go on about my memories of the program... about how nearly 22 years after that glorious first landing it was the very same shuttle that never came home... about the direct connections I had to the Space Shuttle Program through the USAF... about so so many points in my life where my memories are framed around shuttle milestones...

But at this moment I feel the power of that lesson from John's Gospel about the greatest love (the kind of love that makes a person lay down his life for others). In the spirit of that love, as a way to honor the drive toward the stars, and as a reminder that we stand on the shoulders of those who paid the ultimate price for our exploration of space, I hereby list the names of the precisely 30 people who have died in service to either the Russian or American space programs. God bless them, one and all:

Valentin Bondarenko

Theodore Freeman

Elliot See

Charles Bassett

Gus Grissom

Edward White II

Roger Chaffee

Vladimir Komarov

Clifton Williams

Michael J. Adams

Robert Lawrence

Yuri Gagarin

Georgi Dobrovolski

Viktor Patsayev

Vladislav Volkov

Greg Jarvis

Christa McAuliffe

Ronald McNair

Ellison Onizuka

Judith Resnik

Michael J. Smith

Dick Scobee

Sergei Vozovikov

Ilan Ramon

Rick D. Husband

William McCool

Michael P. Anderson

David M. Brown

Kalpana Chawla

Laurel B. Clark