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Mercury, January/February 1999 Table of Contents

I'm fickle. I'm a tah-rah-rah-boom-dee-aye, slogan-flinging, hoist your banner high ("What does it say?"), let's climb on the bandwagon kind of guy. Well, not usually, but I have my moments. And now my colors fly proudly: red, white, and NASA meatball blue.

Last night I celebrated having finished marking my last set of examinations for the semester by sitting down in front of the television and cracking some pecans. Shuttling between "Animals That Kill for Fun" and "Astrology: Science of the Future," I came upon live coverage of construction of the International Space Station. And I was hooked.

For the past decade my thoughts and comments regarding the Station have echoed those of many in the astronomy community: What kind of science can really be pursued on the Station? What falls under the rubric "microgravity research"? It's just about jobs, right? And why can't the Station at least mimic the circular grace of Kubrick's great wheel station? I know, I know. The year 2001 is just around the corner, but we've a ways to go to reach the cinematic visions that make us want tomorrow here today.

Assembly of the International Space Station has begun. Image courtesy of NASA.

Those images of the astronauts working silently in that cold emptiness just a few hundred miles above excited me again. On a hot July night in 1969, my parents and I watched something I had dreamed of for what seemed like all of my seven years. It was past my bedtime, but there we all sat, willing the VHF fuzz away so that we could better see history. A shadow, motion, "Yes, that's him," and then Neil Armstrong's rattling announcement from a world away. I don't remember what any of us said, but I do remember the excitement and ache of desire that followed me to bed that night - somebody like me was out there, and he was telling me (forget everyone else) that I was there, too.

A while after that I remember scouring magazines for photographs from the mission. Anything I could find went in a huge scrapbook, and I came across an interesting picture in Life or some such magazine. In the background was a television set, and seated in front of it were men wearing what looked like long robes, their heads covered in round mounds of cloth. These people were from a different place than I, but they glowed gray-blue just as I had that night. They sat leaning into their television, the wash of photons possibly carrying some little bit of energy from those lunar explorers so far away. The world was smaller to me when I saw that photograph, and I felt linked to those older men. We had been joined, if only for the briefest time, in something larger than ourselves.

Since then I've had similar rushes - at a Russian-American handshake in mated Apollo-Soyuz crafts, at probe flybys of bloated worlds that could swallow mine whole, and at images from the Hubble Space Telescope. All these emotional surges, placing me with the spacecraft or astronaut, have come from NASA. And now I succumb again. Sure, the Station is about jobs, and sure, all types of science will not be possible on the platform, but it's a step up, a permanent uplift out and into space.

Almost everything we've accomplished or attained in our extraterrestrial investigations could have been done by automatons, and some might argue, should have been done by them. But that omits the human element, seems to me, that excitement that blends us into a smooth continuum of emotion and feeling. Something bigger than we compels us to face it as a "we."

All those years ago I remember doing some quick ciphering and finding that I would be 39 years old in 2001. Spinning cities in space, colonies on the Moon, and me out there somehow. Either in the flesh, my flesh, or in the flesh, that of humanity. We may be a little behind, but I am excited, bleary-eyed, and a seven year old again in my heart.

James C. White II