Beyond Rocket Science

When I was young, I read a book about a trip to the moon. Three children snuck into a barn owned by an eccentric professor and found a strange looking machine. They climbed inside to explore and hit the wrong button. The machine became airborne and soon they were on their way to the moon, which, of course, was made of cheese. It was a great story, but obviously fiction. People didn’t fly to the moon.

I’m embarrassed to say that I was rather unimpressed by Alan Shepard’s flight into space. Our entire school was packed into the assembly room and directed to watch the small television that was mounted on the wall. The show was over before it had hardly started. Given the television’s size and poor reception, it was difficult to see much. It just couldn’t compare with fictional moon voyages. In 1969, however, I was glued to the television as Neil Armstrong made that first step onto the moon. In my childhood, moon travel had been fiction. Two months before my daughter was born, it was a reality. I was impressed.

In some ways, the most impressive part of space travel is right here on earth. The space race provided a major impetus for technological growth. I recently read about a company that began manufacturing precision motorsfor the aerospace industry. Today, that same high precision engineering is also used to build motors and other components for the medical, technological and food industries. Back when the only home computers were owned by geeks, who purchased old mainframes and stored them in their basements, I worked for a university that had been gifted a computer from a space craft. Compared to today’s hp ultrabooks and iPads, it might seem big, but it was tiny in comparison to other computers of its time. The space age also fueled our imaginations. When we move from science fiction to reality in one generation, we realize that there are endless possibilities. Think about that the next time you pull out your Nook or watch some HDTV.