Figure 1 – The first launch of Orion, Dec. 5, 2014. Photocredit NASA/Sandra Joseph and Kevin O’Connell

Quite frankly, more and more we seem to be going to hell in a hand-basket, and if it weren’t for my intrinsic faith in youth and the future, I would be quite despairing.  It’s all cyclical.  Many years ago at the height of the Vietnam War, (I will remind you, casualties probably exceeded two million.)  I remember my father despairing.  This was not the world that he had hoped for in his youth.  This was not what “The Greatest Generation” had fought and sacrificed so much for.

Sometimes it takes an event or an image to inspire you.  Yesterday I found myself watching the launch and return to splash down of NASA’s Orion Spacecraft. Found myself? I was drawn to it.  The beautiful image of Figure 1 becomes iconic!  My fellow office geeks and I were watching the event in my office Friday, and I could barely contain myself.  “Will you look at that,” I kept saying.  My friends were tolerant.

We are fulfilling a promise of my youth.  We are going to Mars.  It is our destiny. E ‘il nostro destino. We are escaping the tethers of Earth, because the mundane yields to our imagination. And for me, my mind went back over fifty years to May 5, 1961 and another iconic image and moment.  It is the image of Figure 2, the launch of Alan B. Shepard and Friendship Seven.

“[We choose to do these things] not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1962

Figure 2 – Launch of Alan B. Shepard on Friendship 7, May 5, 1961. Image from NASA.