Want to know what’s weird?
My 27 year-old son calls, wants to know if I’ve been watching the Orion test launch. He’s been up since seven to watch with his four year-old son. “Dad, you’ve got to see this. This Orion mission will be to our generation what Apollo was to yours.”
TV coverage has emphasized that it’s been 42 years since the last manned flight beyond low orbit, the end of the Apollo moon program. When (and if) Orion launches with people in it that will be over 50 years between such spaceflights. And it will be the 2030s before a trip to Mars, the point of the whole Orion mission.
Really? 42 years? (Or 75 between actual escapes from Earth’s gravity if the Mars trip actually happens?) How can that be?
He sends me a link to the launch and I tune in. But it’s sort of boring. All the TV commentary about reentry temperatures, heat shields, etc.etc. Same old-same old. Didn’t they have all that figured out in the 60s?
The same old-fashioned recovery via a dunk in the ocean. Really? 40, 50 years later and we’re still having to fish it out of the drink? Seems sort of crude.
Weird to think that space travel is an antique of almost 50 years old. To my son it’s whatModel T Fords and crude, pre-Lindbergh airplanes were to me when I watched that July 1969 moonwalk: ancient history, a bygone era.
Space travel is the most iconic, compelling image of the future we have. And it’s 42 years—a couple of generations— old. And counting. The future is a relic of the past.
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