Rocket Man

I was born on the edge of the space age. The year of the first men in space and President Kennedy's historic speech, challenging the nation to land "a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth" before the end of the decade.

Space exploration defined my boyhood. Small scale models of various spacecraft filled the shelves in my bedroom, nestled among book titles such as Tom Swift and His Outpost in Space and a double sided Little Golden Book titled "Planet" and "Space Flight". While in grade school, I somehow convinced my parents to allow me to take our television to school on days when Saturn rockets would launch carrying men into space or when capsules carrying those men would plunge through the atmosphere and splash down on the blue waters of the Pacific.

July is a banner month for space enthusiasts. On July 14, 1965, Mariner 4 arrived at Mars and gave scientists their first views of the planet at close range. Apollo 11 made the first successful soft landing on the Moon and Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, Jr. become the first human beings to set foot on another world on July 20, 1969. July 17, 1975 was the date an American Apollo and Soviet Soyuz dock in what was the first international spacecraft rendezvous. July 20, 1976 brought us the first pictures of the surface of Mars, sent back to Earth by Viking 1, the first U.S. spacecraft to successfully land a on another planet. On July 9, 1979, Voyager 2 arrived at Jupiter and Voyager 1 arrived at Saturn, both spacecraft sending back extraordinary images of the planets and their moons. The Mars Pathfinder landed on Mars on July 4, 1997. Twenty five years after Voyager, the Cassini Probe arrived at Saturn on July 1, 2004, beginning four years of photographing the ringed planet and its many moons. On July 4, 2005, the Deep Impact space probe fulfills its mission by slamming into a comet known as Tempel 1.

We celebrate Independence Day with good food, friends and fireworks, looking to a sky filled with colorful lights, reminding us of the rocket's red glare that marked the beginning of this great nation. For those of us born to yearn for the stars, we follow the streaks of light into the sky and, as Ptolemy said during the second century AD, our feet no longer touch the earth.