Galileo – September 1979
(1979)*
Robert L. Forward
(as by Susan Lull)
It was 17 December 1903. The snow fell in great flakes on the frozen torrents of Niagara Falls. I didn't see it—I was too mad. I cried at the indignity I had just suffered... cried and cried and cried...
"Good," said the Doctor, "A nice healthy daughter, Mrs. Lull." Mother raised her exhausted body and rested on her elbow as she looked out at the snowdrifts glistening like white sand dunes in the shining moonlight. There was a soft glow in the eastern sky—day would soon be starting.
"Daybreak, Orville," said Wilbur. "Got to get going before the winds get too strong. Looks like a good day for flying." He raised the shade and looked out at the white dunes of Kitty Hawk. He glimpsed a distant flashing of wing, a tiny sharp-tipped point of feather that soared and turned in the morning light. It soon would be replaced by a quivering contraption made of wood, fabric, and courage that would take the human race into the heavens.
The world around me was interesting and I wanted to explore it, but I was just a girl.
"Girls don't play with watches," said father in a kindly way as he carefully extracted the mysterious ticking machine from my eager, pudgy hands.
"You'll fall and hurt yourself," my mother protested as she directed my father's dismantling of my first attempt at a tree house.
"No, you can't go to Albany with your father and brother to watch Glenn Curtis take off for New York City."
Mr. Curtis made it—non-stop—and won a $10,000 prize. Those were the days when $10,000 was enough to start an aircraft company. My friend's father worked at the Curtis Company in Buffalo. When I was 14 he arranged for both of us to take our first ride in an airplane. The thrill of flying above the clouds sent my soul soaring. I felt as if I could do anything! But in fifteen minutes my feet and spirit were back on the ground, held there firmly by the enervating pull of gravity.
The Girl Scouts came to the rescue. I would endure my months-long imprisonment in school knowing that soon I would start my many weeks of freedom in summer camp. We Girl Scouts didn't get to do the really fun things—like axe throwing contests—that the Boy Scouts in the camp around the lake could do. But there were many unforgettable moments: My first canoe paddle—laboriously whittled out of a birch plank. The bird-like view from the peak of Eagle Mountain—how I wished I could have soared back down over those slopes that I had so laboriously climbed. The races—hunched over the bow of a canoe, my paddle dipping into the shining, flawless sky of the lake. I felt as if I were back flying again in that Curtis trainer.
It was late in the summer of 1918 when the camp counselor called me in to give me the news. My big brother, fascinated with airplanes since that first visit to Albany, had volunteered for the Army Air Corps. He had been sent with the American Expeditionary Force to fight in France. His plane had gone down somewhere over the Marne. I spent the rest of the day on Eagle Mountain, watching the soaring birds through blinking eyes ...
I got married the week Lindy flew across the Atlantic. My husband and I used to joke about naming our first child Charles after Lindbergh, but it was no longer a joke after the tragic loss of Lindy's child. We named our boy Robert, after his father. Five years after Robert, my Amelia was born. The world had lost one Amelia that year and I tried to make up for it in the only way I could.
When Pearl Harbor came, my husband attempted to join the armed forces. They told him he was too old to fight and sent him back to his job of making radios. As the war dragged on, he found himself working on the new top secret radars. He finally got his wish and went overseas to Britain, where he installed the radar detection systems that helped the RAF pilots defeat the Luftwaffe and the buzz bombs.
The German V-2 rocket weapon scared me. I feared that America was going to lose to an onslaught of Nazi missiles that blasted their way into outer space, to come dropping down out of the blackness onto any point on the globe. Fortunately, the rockets couldn't go very far, just across the Channel. But that was enough, two days before D-Day, A devastating blast from a V-2 took my husband from me.
Why must we always take our greatest accomplishments and use them to kill each other?
My two children slowed me down some. But the year after my son Robert went off to graduate school, Amelia got out of high school; then she and I both blossomed. She became a stewardess and introduced me to the joys of transcontinental flight—looking down from heights taller than the tallest mountain. She was just like me, always wanting to know how things worked—and insisting on finding out the answer herself. Our first quest was to learn how to fly. We got our private licenses at the same time (but I soloed first).
A baby slowed her down a little, too. When my granddaughter came, I visited Amelia's home in California to help take care of the new arrival. In the wee hours of the morning, in early October 1957, I was up; walking back and forth with my cranky granddaughter on my shoulder. Fortunately, there was an early morning program on the local educational television station to relieve the monotony. My granddaughter and I were first treated to an excellent illustrated lecture on the principles of rocket flight. The screen then flashed to a picture describing the first rocket ship that was going to leave the earth's surface and go into orbit. President Eisenhower had been waffling around, but finally had decided to let the Vanguard project proceed. I was elated. We Americans were finally going to go somewhere!
An exhausted Amelia finally woke up and dragged herself out of bed. She took her sulky baby from me, and sat down in front of a picture window overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The whimpers changed to croons as the atmosphere in the room changed from cranky tension to contentment. I should have gone back to bed, but instead I just turned off the sound on the TV, and lay back on the sofa.
I watched Amelia sitting in the flickering light, nursing her baby and staring up at the infinitely deep darkness of the star-speckled blackness, gazing outwards at unseen other worlds as mothers had been doing for millennia. Only now, instead of squatting at the open entrance of a cave illuminated by quivering yellow-red flames, she was rocking at a picture window in a house illuminated by twinkling blue-white images. I was at peace.
Suddenly I heard my daughter gasp in astonishment. My eyes blinked open. Through the window I saw a large star rising slowly over the horizon. The light was not that of an airplane, and it was moving too slowly to be a shooting star. It came drifting overhead, to pass beyond the trees beside the house. I ran back to the television and flipped around the channels to the morning news.
Sputnik! The Russians had beat us into space!
It was really humiliating for the next few years. While we were lobbing a few monkeys and men into the warm waters of the southern Atlantic, the Russians were flashing around in orbit overhead, glancing down with condescension at our meager efforts.
Yet, they were brave, too, those Russian men—and that woman, too. Valentina may have just been along for the ride in an automated capsule, but she still had courage, for space is never safe. Besides, she got to see the world from a height that few would ever see—especially me. At 59 I knew that the highest I would ever fly would be on one of the new jet airplanes that could cruise at almost ten kilometer's altitude.
I was really proud of John Kennedy. Everyone said that the reason that he set the goal of going to the moon was to get people to forget about the Bay of Pigs fiasco. But his was a great challenge, and he brought greatness out of America as it responded to that challenge.
That is what I want out of my country's leaders. I don't want a caretaker that hoards pennies and tries to keep everything the way it always was—you will never win at that game. I want someone that will give me a part of something bigger than just staying alive. We are all on this earth for only a short time. We all have to die sooner or later; so why not do something interesting and long-lasting while we are here?
All of America became involved in the Apollo project. People cared. Sending people out into the hostile environment of space means that you don't take chances. I was explaining this to the children in my kindergarten class. For a successful mission, everything must work correctly. Every bolt must be tight, every part must work, nothing must fail; or the astronauts would die.
I was proud of America. Every worker did their best, everyone felt responsible, no one shirked their responsibilities. Every screw in every capsule, every stitch in every suit, was carefully labored over like Cellini sculpting one of his beautiful golden salt-cellars. It all came together, it all worked.
Some people feel that the culmination of the Apollo program was the first landing upon the moon. I suppose that's true, but to me a close second was the orbiting of the moon by Apollo 8 on Christmas Day 1968. I remember that year well—it was time for me to retire from teaching.
I had flown to Florida to watch the launch. Actually you don't so much watch a launch of a Saturn V as you feel it. The deep rumble stirs the very soil, grabs your innards and shakes them like a terrier, then the sound finally reaches your ears and you stand in awe as the huge cylinder, with its precious cargo perched on top, ponderously lifts itself on tiptoes of flame into the clouds.
20 July 1969. They landed!! Everyone saw. A half-billion people in the world watched the same thing. A man on the moon! It had been a fable of the comic books and the Saturday morning movies since you were a child, and now it was here.
You always knew the moon was there, but you never believed that a human being ever really would go there. It was positively thrilling!
The whole world hovered in front of television screens, hoping that the cameras would work so they could show what the moon was really like. Then there were the worries. Suppose there were mechanical problems and they could not take off? There would not be a thing that could be done to save them.
Finally the two ghost-like images climbed back into their spacecraft and started their return trip. As they approached the earth, the apprehension for their safety grew. After all their success, to have it end with an accident seemed almost too much to bear. I was scared. But they made it home safely.
The whole human race was exultant. Nothing of any real significance had happened to the human species for thousands and thousands of years, and suddenly we seemed to be on the move.
But what we thought was a giant leap turned out to be just a baby step. Death even stalked the thirteenth step—yet the men were saved by Mother NASA's multi-redundant protective arms. But was NASA too protective? Was the costly security built into every mission too much?
Any mother could have told them that young children have to be turned loose—to fall if need be—else they will never grow into maturity. The astronauts had courage, but the nation's leaders faltered. Protected, coddled, the Apollo program slowed—as if scared by the darkness outside.
On my 69th birthday I heard some news from my son Robert. He had built a device to measure the gravity field of the moon. He had hoped to get the apparatus on Apollo 17, but the time pressures and the shrinking NASA budgets had caused the experiment to be postponed until the next flight. But there were no more flights ...
I now have six grandchildren. One of them calculates interplanetary trajectories for the Pioneer space probes at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He used to be at the Cape before they had their big cutback. Another grandchild is busy building the Space Shuttle at Rockwell. Right now they have her gluing the heat shield tiles onto the last two orbiters, but she is concerned about her job because she doesn't see anything coming after that.
My oldest granddaughter earned a Ph.D. in Space Sciences, but that wasn't enough to get her past the second round in the recent astronaut selection competition. She is not discouraged, though. She has qualified for her commercial pilot's license, and is now studying for an M.D. in Aerospace Medicine. The next time they have a competition for new astronauts, she is going to get in—one way or the other. I worry, though. Will there be another selection?
20 July 1979—the tenth anniversary of the first landing on the moon. 1 go to Washington to visit the Air and Space Museum. My first stop is at the Wright Flyer, where I look up at the 75-year-old antique that is now as old and weary as I am. Carefully making my way through the crowds, I walk over to one side of the huge open room, where an armed man in uniform stands guarding a pedestal. I look at the piece of stone embedded there. I reach out my hand—to touch the moon!
We made a long reach into outer space and now the moon is only an arm's length away.
I reach, but our grasp falters. I yearn, but our ambition fades. This world is too old, too weary, too worn out, too full. This is not what I want. This is not good enough for my children or my grandchildren.
I spent my whole lifetime looking at the light of one sun. There are other suns out there. I want a new light. I want a different light.
I want the stars for my children.
I demand the stars for my children!!!
The End
sleipnir 2/29/2012
allforjesus2001