This is an exciting day in space. NASA and ESA cooperated to land the Huygens probe on Titan this morning after decades of work and seven years of gliding through space as part of the Cassini mission. Where’s Titan, you ask? Oh, just one of the moons of Saturn. A million miles away. And people just landed a probe there, one that parachuted down through the atmosphere, landed on something solid, and continued to transmit from the surface of Titan. Pretty damn cool.
And in other interesting space news, Jen‘s employer, Blue Origin, has finally gone public with their plans “to build a suborbital space facility on a sprawling ranch under the wide open skies of West Texas.” Exciting.
Last night I went to my former division chief’s retirement party. The room was absolutely packed with probably 300, if not 400, people there to thank Ron for his 37 years of service to NASA. As I looked around the room, I was amazed by the magnitude of the people there; many of the people in the older crowd there were the pioneers of mission operations, especially flight dynamics and trajectory design, as they’re done today. Those of you who don’t follow the space program wouldn’t recognize the names or understand exactly what I’m trying to say… But seeing some of the people there, and knowing what they’ve done (because I’ve read about them in books — they’re important enough to have been discussed at length in books!) was truly humbling.
I can’t help but wonder if my generation will be viewed that way when we start to retire sometime around 2040. Will we have accomplished the magnitude of things that the Apollo generation has? Will anyone be able to say about us the things we say about them? We all have so many different dreams and ambitions, and frustrations with the current state of things, that it’s hard to imagine that most of us will even still be here in 2040. And yet after watching all the presentations at the retirement party last night, I feel a bit inspired. Maybe we do need to stay at NASA. Maybe we need to become the new generation of “steely eyed missile men” and make sure that NASA goes somewhere and does something great. I don’t know if NASA can ever recapture the Apollo era, and doubt that it would be the right thing even if it could. But maybe we could create our own version, with something new.
I don’t know. I’m just rambling, really. I guess I just want to point out that while I may complain a lot about my job, there is a reason why I haven’t left yet:
I still think space is damn cool. And I still have hope.