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kareilaI had forgotten buying this when it was on the New Releases shelf at Powell's Books in 2015, back when I was visiting Portland every summer for various open source conferences. After I finished The New Guys, I went looking for my unread copy of Lynn Sherr's biography of Sally Ride and came away with this instead.
The subtitle hasn’t aged well, since this was published when we were relying on Soyuz to reach the space station, before the Crew Dragon capsule and the Artemis test flights became a reality. It's not exactly an authoritatively informative read, but it is an interesting one, full of insightful anecdotes. The author, a professor from Knoxville, details her personal spaceflight-related experiences and encounters, starting as a young girl visiting the Smithsonian, up to and including the final three launches of the space shuttle: first Discovery, then Endeavour, and finally Atlantis. She also repeatedly compares her observations with the ones related by those who wrote about what she calls the "heroic era" of American spaceflight in the 1960s.
The publication in 2007 of her first book, a juvenile fiction novel about a young girl living at Cape Canaveral in the aftermath of the Challenger explosion, brought her into contact with an appreciative reader named Omar who worked at Kennedy Space Center. They became Facebook friends, and he eventually invited her to visit the facility, which gave her the idea to write this book.
She eloquently captures what it was like to Be There, at that specific place and time in history. Having attended the final launch of Atlantis myself, I recognized my experience in her own, and only wished I could have written words as appropriately profound as these:
Although the book's epilogue says that Omar was laid off in early 2013, I looked him up on Twitter and was happy to discover that he is once again working for NASA. Four days ago he posted: "Looking forward to sharing Artemis with people at KSC Family and Friends day today." That's the same annual event where in 2010 he met the author in person for the first time.
The dream is still alive. For now.
The subtitle hasn’t aged well, since this was published when we were relying on Soyuz to reach the space station, before the Crew Dragon capsule and the Artemis test flights became a reality. It's not exactly an authoritatively informative read, but it is an interesting one, full of insightful anecdotes. The author, a professor from Knoxville, details her personal spaceflight-related experiences and encounters, starting as a young girl visiting the Smithsonian, up to and including the final three launches of the space shuttle: first Discovery, then Endeavour, and finally Atlantis. She also repeatedly compares her observations with the ones related by those who wrote about what she calls the "heroic era" of American spaceflight in the 1960s.
The publication in 2007 of her first book, a juvenile fiction novel about a young girl living at Cape Canaveral in the aftermath of the Challenger explosion, brought her into contact with an appreciative reader named Omar who worked at Kennedy Space Center. They became Facebook friends, and he eventually invited her to visit the facility, which gave her the idea to write this book.
She eloquently captures what it was like to Be There, at that specific place and time in history. Having attended the final launch of Atlantis myself, I recognized my experience in her own, and only wished I could have written words as appropriately profound as these:
The light emanating from a space shuttle launch is different in color, quality, and intensity from any other kind of light. Photographs and videos can only approximate it, can only serve as a souvenir to the odd sensation, the combination of beauty and near-painfulness of that specific brightness in the sky.
And now the sound comes toward us: bassy, crackly, like a fireworks display that never lets up. The sound goes right through you, and if you have become too emotionally involved in the space program, this sound will make you cry. It’s the sound of American exploration, the sound of missiles put to better use than killing or threatening to kill, a sound that means we came in peace for all mankind.
Although the book's epilogue says that Omar was laid off in early 2013, I looked him up on Twitter and was happy to discover that he is once again working for NASA. Four days ago he posted: "Looking forward to sharing Artemis with people at KSC Family and Friends day today." That's the same annual event where in 2010 he met the author in person for the first time.
The dream is still alive. For now.
