On Not Getting a Rocket Ship for my Birhday--Again

 

Today, on my seventy-fifth birthday, I remember a conversation my half-uncle Frank and I had on or near my fifteenth birthday.  We were riding our bicycles around the complicated corner of Vine and Matthews in Jonesboro, and we were happy that in just one more year we could legally drive by ourselves, and that in not many more years we would be able to travel around in space.  We had spent a lot of our weekends and allowances on our space program.  

About fifteen  years ago, having determined that I had become a man, I put away some childish things, including my car.  But I still had a bicycle, and I was still interested in space travel.  Now I am riding a four-year old bicycle, a gift to myself on my seventy-first birthday.  It satisfies most of my travel needs, and there are buses and trains and airplanes for the others.  Still, almost every year I put it out there that I want a space ship.

However, I think it is time also to put it out there that what is available to me in space experience exceeds anything Frank and I had hoped for.   For sure it would have been a big and splashy thing if we could have blasted off to the Moon or to Mars and walked around the block and come back, kinda like the NASA trips to the Moon.  But we would not have seen nearly so much of the solar system as I can access any time I want to from the comfort of my desk without the constant alcohol burns Frank and I got from our backyard space program.  There are the photos from the ISS of my back yard, photos of the Moon from satellites and telescopes far beyond what we dreamed, and the Mars robots data and Cassini's images and Voyager I and Voyager II's images and data, and of course the wonderful images from the miracle that is the Hubble Telescope, and maybe finally soon, the James Webb will join those wanderers to send back even more data that I can enjoy and that today's fifteen-year-old kids can study to understand more than we have ever known before.

And since I'm sort of a McLuhanist, I look at those probes into space as extensions of myself, and of all us folks on our little blue ball.  The fifty years that have passed since Frank and I had that discussion on the corner of Matthews and Vine have seen advances in the way we can view and analyze the universe far beyond anything we could imagine with our aluminum foil and rubber cement rockets and fresnel lens spectrograph.  My recurring desire to have a space ship is surpassed yet again by what I really have at my disposal.

Frank did not survive to share in all of these wonders.  He died in 1999 from AIDS.  But, as I gaze up at the Milky Way or scroll through Hubble's hundreds of images of real galaxies far, far away, I still feel that he is my partner in this exploration.  Time is an odd thing.  If there is some super-powerful telescope aimed at the earth and located about fifty light years away, it can still see the two of us gluing together our fuel tanks for the space ship we never finished.