BABOOoom! My eyes flew open. It was still dark outside. I sat forward a bit in bed and looked at the clock on the little round table across the room; it was just after 5 AM. Something had collided with the house, shaking the walls and windows. Or maybe someone had fallen out of bed. I wasn't sure, so I pushed aside my blankets and got out of bed.
I walked across the room and into our hallway, ears alert to any sound of crying or movement. At the end of the hall, I could see the glow of a night light from Josh's open door; he was lying in the doorway, entwined in a blanket, sound asleep. Ben's door was still closed, and I couldn't hear any sounds of crying.
I pondered what I had heard, and the realization dawned on me. The space shuttle had been trying to return to Earth for the last several days, continuously thwarted by bad weather in Florida. I concluded that they must have decided to land at Edwards Air Force Base. I returned to the room and told Amy, who also was awake now, of my suspicion. She reached over her side of the bed and grabbed her laptop (which we lovingly call "Lappy"), whipped it open, and checked the headlines at Yahoo! to confirm that the space shuttle was scheduled to land at 8:12 AM Eastern at Edwards, confirming my theory.
Amy turned on the TV and we watched images of the landing space shuttle. Then we watched infrared, night vision footage of the shuttle at rest, crews coming out to do their work. I learned that it can take upward of 45 minutes before the space shuttle's crew emerges after landing. I cannot imagine having been couped up in the small compartments of a space shuttle or even of the International Space Station for several days, with the cold dark of space just on the other side of the wall and the neverending fear that maybe your shuttle would encounter the same fate as Columbia's on the way home, only to land and have to wait even a minute more. I'd want to throw open the hatch, leap to the ground, and hug myself to it.
We watched a few minutes more, but eventually fatigue overcame me and I returned to sleep. Amy watched a bit longer, I think.
When I was a boy, I dreamt of being an astronaut. I had a plan to do it, too. And I think that the fire of it gave me a lot of incentive to do well in school. Eventually, before I entered Junior High, much of the fervor of that dream had faded away. By that time, I had come to realize the danger of space flight, having seen the Challenger accident only a few years before. Much of the space exploration landscape had changed, and has continued to change. Amy reminded me of how frequently we used to hear the sonic booms of a landing space shuttle when we were children, and how rarely we hear them now. A quick search on the Internet told us that Edwards is no longer regularly used as the landing site for the shuttle, and hasn't been since 1984, thus the less frequent booms. I remember the loud growl that would permeate the valley every once in awhile, accompanied by a huge plume of steam and smoke on the hills to the Southeast when Rocketdyne would test rockets, but that facility is no more.
Times have changed, and space exploration has, in many ways, become a sterile and routine undertaking. Only events like the Columbia accident and the various Mars exploration debacles remind us of the risks and costs involved, making the exploration of space more real somehow, more down to Earth.
Someday, I hope that we can make a trip out to Florida to watch a space shuttle launch. I hope man returns to space again soon. Space exploration is a risky undertaking. It always has been and it always will be. Sometimes it is hard to understand the value of sending man into space, but I think that the value has something to do with inspiring man to do great things. Even here on Earth in our everyday lives. It certainly inspired me as a boy. I think I need to remind myself of this now and then.
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