Sunday morning and the Space Shuttle Endeavor is on the launchpad ready for countdown in a few minutes. There's even a Yorkshire-born astronaut on board, Dr. Nicholas Patrick who hails from Saltburn, where we were at Christmas! Small world. It's the last night-time adventure for this shuttle and for me a symbol of a waning space programme and it's fading from modern life and popular culture. A friend of mine says we should look inward to Earth rather than outward in space. Barack Obama must feel the same as he puts the space programme in the attic. Maybe its human nature to look down when we are under the economic kosh. Perhaps the Space Race was after all a glorious fluke, the white-hot child of superpowers embraced in a cold war. The pundit on the TV says it's down to the Chinese now, which is ironic considering that virtually all our baby boomer space toys were made in Hong Kong anyway!
I for one am looking up and still humming Bowie's seventies song that starts 'It's a God-awful small affair, for the girl with the mousey hair.......'
PS. Endeavor launch cancelled until Monday!
I think the turning inwards will be a terrible mistake. The time to look up and out is precisely when things are darkest and the cosh is at its most heavy.
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It's strange how 1960's America and Russia could afford the Space programs each had but not now. You'd have thought that technology hot got better and cheaper.They're talking about needing something to capture our imaginations again and for me it would be a manned mission to Mars, nothing less will do. Maybe the space race is like a life, starting off with a bang, partying through teenage, having a few adult dust-ups before the slow comfy years of mid- life set in. I reckon, like kids born at the same time in the late 50's/early 60's, the space race has got its slippers on and is sat dreaming of revving the chevvy one more time.
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