_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [127]
I was laughing and driving home from another day of covering the construction of the space station. Telling whoppers, I suppose, is fuel for writers and, once again, I reminded myself there was nothing more important than family. Family is simply the continuation of life, and we inhabit a stirring, surging, moving, living planet. It is our spaceship Earth, where we see the beginning of life, its present, and its end. But more important, we recognize that our spaceship’s bounty is finite. Its supply of energy, foodstuffs, clean atmosphere, and pristine waters will be depleted.
Astronomers have already identified more than 150 planets within reach of future rockets. These new Earths will be needed desperately when our planet’s wells run dry, its fields turn to dust, and our agitated sun turns it to a cinder.
Those entrusted with power should heed the words written more than a century ago by a Russian teacher of science, Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, who was the first known human to envision and draw up concepts for the use of rockets in space travel. In a simple but wonderfully elegant turn of words, Tsiolkovsky surveyed the future and saw what the human race must do and where it must go.
“Earth is the cradle,” wrote the self-taught man reaching for tomorrow, “but one cannot live in the cradle forever.”
I was suddenly aware of the cradle around me as I drove. A cold front had passed through earlier in the morning and left behind a sky of rare clarity. There were the whitest of puffy clouds floating against a rich, clean blue, and beneath this portrait of a perfect day were stands of pine and palm lost in a mass of green.
I followed sun reflections leaping along the surface of marsh ponds—familiar landscape to me. I had first driven this same land many years ago when I moved to Cape Canaveral, where I would meet my wife Jo, raise a family, and build a life and a career with NBC.
Where do you find such a wife and such a place to work?
I’m convinced you don’t unless you are blessed.
Somebody up there definitely likes me!
I was feeling the same renewal as the morning rains had brought the flora surging to life along my drive. Azalea and bougainvillea and oleander blossoms and palms and saw grass created a never-ending savanna, and I suddenly realized, after fifty years reporting from this place, I did not want it to end.
I laughed at the impossible and thought about the future—a future where the fog was beginning to clear on NASA’s next generation of rockets and crafts to replace the Space Shuttle. First, the International Space Station’s construction was to be completed to give Earth an orbiting outpost for habitation by humans. This truly could be the first step out of Tsiolkovsky’s cradle, where humans could, if they chose, use the station as the cornerstone for an orbiting city. Where families could work and grow and prepare for deeper journeys into the solar system.
The plans had long been on NASA’s drawing boards.
Many had been approved, and in the coming months, the building and testing of the rockets named Ares and the spaceship named Orion that will replace the Space Shuttles will be underway—sleek rockets and a reliable spaceship that are scheduled to carry astronauts back to where they last walked on lunar soil in 1972.
Four are to go in the space capsule Orion that is in fact a larger, modern version of Apollo. They will not be going for national prestige, as Americans had gone before. This time, they will be going for science and survival and, most important, to stay. They will build outposts and pave the way for eventual journeys to Mars and possibly beyond.
And once that lunar outpost is built,