Mr. Spaceman

As child of the space age, exploration beyond our atmosphere defined my childhood. As I wrote last year, I somehow convinced my parents while I was in grade school 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.

On April 12, 1981, we were again glued to the television as the Space Shuttle Columbia became the first shuttle to orbit the Earth. We watched history in the making as the first spacecraft intended to be used more than once lifted off from Complex 39 Pad A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Since the late 1960s, Pads A and B at Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39 have served as backdrops for America's most significant manned space flight endeavors - Apollo, Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz and the Space Shuttle. The shuttle raced off the pad, literately taking off like a rocket, especially compared to the lumbering Saturn rockets that slowly built up speed, lifting heavy payloads to Earth orbit and beyond.

On July 8, 2011, I watched the the Space Shuttle Atlantis lift off, the last shuttle to orbit the Earth. Dragging a television into my office wasn't necessary, as the all-knowing and ever-present Internet provided the images. The world has changed dramatically in the last 50 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, and much of the technology that has changed it was born of the space program.

Ear thermometers, smoke detectors, hand-held vacuum cleaners, water filters, ergonomic furniture, portable X-ray machines, programmable pacemakers, concentrated baby foods, freeze-dried instant mixes, biofeedback techniques used to reduce stress, kidney dialysis machines, reflective materials used to insulate homes, water purification technology, flame-resistant textiles, telecommunications and the Global Positioning System (GPS)...the list goes on and on, and almost all of these items pale in comparison to what some consider the single greatest result of the space program: microprocessors.

During the 1950s, computers were the size of a supermarket. Traveling into space required computers that could fit into a much smaller footprint, the now practically non-existent phone booth (see telecommunications in the paragraph above). Companies experimented with ways to reduce the size of computers, eventually resulting in the microprocessor. Every one of the tiny computer chips found in personal computers, commercial airplanes, automobiles, washers and dryers, cell phones and tens of thousands of other products trace their beginnings back to those integrated circuits first developed for the space program.

Times are tough and many of us don't have the money we need to live on; the government isn't funding much in terms of space exploration and there will be a several year gap before NASA puts its own astronauts into space. The roar of millions of pounds of thrust putting men and women into orbit will not be there to inspire the next generation to study math and science, so if there ever was a time when more investment in science education was necessary it is now. Scientific growth means economic growth and there is still much to discover.

The future of manned flight looks to depend on private companies like SpaceX, Lockheed Martin and Boeing for low earth orbit vehicles, while NASA aims to solve the next step in exploring ever further in space. It doesn't matter who works on what, but rather that the work continues, that dreams are dreamt, that the impossible is sought to be made possible, that we continue to look to the new frontier, wherever that may be.