_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [120]
The Space Shuttle Atlantis is seen here streaking through orbit behind the International Space Station under a Texas moon. (Scott M. Lieberman).
My grandson Brian and his friends in Illinois spotted the station early one evening and freaked out. “Papa Jay,” Brian phoned me excitedly. “We just saw this thing that looked like the biggest and brightest star ever moving across the sky. It was way up there…It was…”
“Brian,” I interrupted, laughing, “You just saw the International Space Station. It travels 52 degrees above and below the equator, and you guys are about 42 degrees.”
“Man, Papa Jay,” he said out of breath, “that thing’s bright.”
“Yep, son, it sure is,” I said, enjoying his excitement. “Once it’s built, it will be the second brightest object in the early-evening and predawn sky.”
“Why’s that, Papa Jay?”
“Because in the early evening, and during a couple of hours before sunrise, the space station will be lit by the sun while it’s dark here on Earth.”
“Oh.”
“Computers are your thing, right?”
“Yes sir.”
“Just go to NASA’s home page, Brian, to the space-station section, and type in your city, and it’ll tell you when the space station will be passing over your location.”
“That’s great, Papa Jay,” Brian said with excitement. “We’ll keep a log up here, and we’ll let you know when we see it, okay?”
“Sure, buddy,” I smiled. “You guys will be my official space-station watchers in Illinois.”
As time passes, the more time one finds to spend with family. Between the Shuttle flights putting more sections of the International Space Station in orbit, the more I found myself on football fields with my oldest grandson, Bryce.
Bryce is the kind of young man most find likable. He is easygoing, with a grinning personality that gets him just about whatever he wants from his grandfather. Not really because of his grin, but because he was a pretty fair country football kicker, and his foot earned him a handful of college scholarships.
The first was from the University of South Carolina, but he decided to play at East Carolina and Shenandoah University in Virginia, where he was voted first-team all-conference two years in a row. He even won Most Valuable Player in Special Teams, and until you have experienced it, it’s hard to match the pride you have in chasing a family member around college football fields.
In a way Bryce and I found more humor in football than we did sincerity, and at the end of the 2002 football season an unusual Space Shuttle launch was calling. I was suddenly focusing on a break in the Shuttle launch team’s space-station construction flights. NASA was preparing the original Space Shuttle for a mission most wished would go away.
Columbia was the first Shuttle and therefore the oldest. It was lovingly called the fleet’s “Hangar Queen,” and most felt there it should stay. The launch team knew that like the senior citizen it was, Columbia was hard to get out of bed, but once it was on its feet, it was vintage dependability.
NASA had promised to fly an Israeli astronaut, and he and six others were going up for sixteen days of science. Columbia’s flight was set for January 16, 2003. The launch team smiled and said, “One more time.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Columbia: Had They Only Looked
I guess those of a superstitious bent could say, “I told you so.”
All the signs were there. Columbia’s STS–107 launch was the 113th Space Shuttle mission. It had slipped into the second half of January, the same general time period as its doomed predecessors, Challenger and Apollo 1.
But there was another sign. It was much more ominous and much less obvious. There had been eighty-seven relatively successful Space Shuttle missions flown since the Challenger accident January 28, 1986, and once again, an aura of what might best be called arrogant complacency