Sputnik (NASA)

When I was younger, I hated it when we would be decorating the Christmas tree and mom would find the star ornament I made and say, “Oh, here’s my favorite, Sputnik!” [Read more about the ornament and the satellite in Chapter 1 of Generation Space: A Love Story.]

You see, I wasn’t into all that space stuff like my sister. I wasn’t paying much attention when the shuttle program was gearing up. Still, I was being raised to be a future news junkie. Thus, my first real Gen Space moment was all of us in mom and dad’s bedroom on the morning of April 14, 1981. I was sitting on the king size bed in my jammies waiting for the first shuttle to land. I can’t remember for sure, but I think we must have been watching Tom Brokaw and John Chancellor on NBC because that was the station our antenna received the most clearly.

There was the communications black-out and reports on the tremendous heat the shutlle was going through. That built the suspense because no one knew what was really happening. Honestly, since this lated 21 minutes, it was a little boring to me because there was a lot of talking. Then, communication was restored and white dot appeared on the screen. [See video below.]

When Columbia finally touched down, I thought, “It’s just a really fat airplane. People will be be able to take an airplane to other planets.” That was such an exciting idea!

Later, in July of that year, Charles and Diana were married. Anna and I stayed up to watch it live. To me, the wedding was a lot more exciting than the shuttle landing.

Today, I see things differently. I love little Sputnik, even if it only has a few toothpicks left. Charles and Di’s marriage didn’t last. But the allure of space lives on with talk of landing people on Mars.

April 12, 1961 (Anna)

If delays hadn’t occurred, Shepard would have been the first human in space. He wasn’t.

YURI GAGARIN HEADLINE

Instead, during those delays, Yuri Gagarin flew to space on April 12, 1961, less than a month before Shepard. The Soviet Union beat the United States in the Space Race—first with a satellite, then with a man. I visited the Soviet Union as a college student in 1986, shortly after the Challenger space shuttle accident, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident, and my father’s death from cancer at age fifty-three. I was twenty-one years old, on the cusp of adulthood, the same age my mother was when she watched Shepard’s flight in that upside-down year: the numbers nineteen and sixty-one are upside-down images of each other, and the year became topsy-turvy with Cold War tensions.

April 12, 1981 (Doug)

STS-1 Launch (NASA)

Eleven shuttle missions occurred while I was in high school and three more during my first semester of college (1981-1984). With each mission, Shuttle opened space travel to more kinds of people. That didn’t start right away. On April 12, 1981, the STS-1 crew consisted of two white men who had been born in the 1930s and had served in the Navy: John Young and Bob Crippen. By STS-5 in November 1982, though, the crew included two mission specialists—Joseph Allen and William Lenoir—and the program was overtly thinking more broadly about who was best suited to do what in this long-term effort.

These excerpts are adapted from Generation Space: A Love Story. Available at Amazon, Stillhouse Press, and elsewhere.

I truly am Generation Space!

John Glenn & Friendship 7 (NASA 1962)

I watched John Glenn become the first American to orbit Earth. I tasted apple sauce from a food tube like those that astronauts ate from and peeked inside a Mercury capsule that was touring the United States.

I told my grade-school principal that I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. She reminded me of this many years later when we served on a youth symphony board together.

I mourned three astronauts that were killed in the Apollo 1 fire. I stayed up late, practically all night, celebrating the first Moon landing and completely filled a scrapbook. I worried for days as Apollo 13 made its way back to Earth.

Skylab & Astronaut Owen Garriott (NASA)

My co-workers and I wore aluminum foil hats and had party the day Skylab crashed in 1979. I was on maternity leave with my first baby, feeding her and watching live TV when we lost Challenger. I celebrated the first woman in space (missed my chance!). I’ve been fascinated by the spectacular images from Hubble.

I never did become an astronaut, but I’ve read my share of science fiction and watched lots of Star Trek. What a wonderful time to exist!

The space shuttle program was as much a part of my childhood as watching the Smurfs on a Saturday morning. For a while, it was equally as routine. On mornings when a shuttle was launching, my dad would wake me up early so we could see it together. We would sit in the living room of our apartment, in our robes and bleary-eyed, and watch another crew fly toward the heavens. Shuttle landings lacked the spectacle that appealed to my young sensibilities, but my dad watched them with equal intent. Some things, I didn’t appreciate until later.

Challenger Accident (NASA 1986)

Like millions of children across the country, I watched the ill-fated Challenger launch from the familiar setting of my school classroom. Our teacher was absent, but we were just as keen to see Christa McAuliffe and her fellow astronauts under the watchful eyes of our substitute. Within moments of what looked like an explosion, the school counselor was in our class of third- and fourth-graders asking if we had questions. I was too stunned to ask anything more than how?

The dangers of space flight had never occurred to me. The early morning launches were simultaneously awe-inspiring and matter of fact: this is who we are and what we do, we send explorers into space. “Manifest destiny” taken to the stars.

International Space Station (NASA)

These days, I spend quite a bit of time talking with my son about the universe and sharing these bits of wonder from my childhood with him. At the age of three, he described his piggy bank as “gibbous”; we have run around the outside of our house to watch the International Space Station travel across the night sky; and his was the voice who told me that “they found more planets around another star” when the Trappist-1 system was announced. All this makes me think wide-eyed wonder might be a genetic trait.