That was 55 years ago, and yet the parallels between 19 are unmistakable: Social tensions. Neither their form nor function was remotely conceivable when the Apollo 8 astronauts circled the moon at Christmastime in 1968, sending unforgettable pictures of their home planet and reading from the Book of Genesis. The $97 million SpaceX rocket that slipped the surly bounds of earth recently was carrying satellites designed to improve internet service in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific region, with another satellite designed to provide high speed internet to remote areas in Alaska. Mission personnel from a private Japanese company may have lost contact with the ispace lunar lander, but the Hakuto-R Mission 1 vehicle is presumed to have crashed in the Atlas Crater on the near side of the moon-like the Starship, an achievement amid disappointment.
The Starship rocket lifted off the pad in Southern Texas, cleared the launchpad, and flew for four minutes before collapsing into a spectacular fireball-and yet SpaceX declared the mission a great success. A Jupiter Icy Moons Explore satellite, known as “Juice,” took off from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, on a mission that will take it through 25 flybys of Jupiter’s Callisto, Europa and Ganymede moons-“one of the most exciting missions we have ever flown in the solar system,” in the characterization of Josef Aschbacher, the head of the European Space Agency, and “by far the most complex.”Īnd there is more. The astronauts who will return to lunar orbit on Artemis II were identified to much fanfare and much public interest. The days when a black-and-white television atop a tall metal tower was wheeled into classrooms for schoolchildren to witness a Project Mercury launch became a fading memory, like the lyrics of a Shelley Fabares song.īut suddenly it is passé to say that spaceflight is passé.
Since Project Apollo, which catapulted men to the moon, ended 48 years ago, and the eclipse of the Space Shuttle, which mounted 135 missions, spaceflight prompted a certain ennui. And somehow the rise of the SpaceX Falcon-Heavy rocket defied the notion that there is no revelation in repetition.Īmericans have been launching rockets from Florida for 73 years the first one was on July 24, 1950, a date hardly anyone marks or even is aware of. VERO BEACH, Fla.-I saw it lift into the dusky heavens, reaching upward in a stunning ballet of determination and grace, creeping across the sky in an orange streak, stretching toward earth orbit. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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