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“To me, this is a culmination and a beginning,” I said in my opening remarks. “It’s the culmination of many years, months, weeks of efforts that I’ve attempted to put into building a coalition, to building a consensus. United we stand. Divided we kinda circle the wagons and shoot inward instead of accomplishing what we’re after.”

I was convinced that at this juncture in history, America was lost in space. I hoped that through the symposium we could stimulate some ideas. “We have to push forward,” I told everyone I met. “We’ve got to set out a new vision for our country’s space program.” NASA didn’t seem to have a clear goal or vision. Moreover, the Chinese had just entered the space picture in October, becoming only the third nation in the world to launch humans into space—taikonauts, they dubbed them—as well as a satellite and probes to the moon, with plans for future probes to Mars. There was some concern that we might be on the verge of new space race in which we were handicapped by the upcoming retirement of the shuttle and the lack of a clear objective.

The futurist Alvin Toffler, whose once-controversial book Future Shock now reads like history, spoke at the conference and encouraged us to look forward to even more astounding developments in flight over the next hundred years. That set the tone, and by the end of the day, our hopes were soaring. The symposium might not have changed the world overnight to get our space program back on track for the next 100 years, but it was a productive exchange of forward-thinking ideas. Best of all, a few weeks later, on January 14, 2004, President George W. Bush announced a renewed “Vision for Space Exploration,” a fresh agenda for NASA and others related to America’s space program, with a goal of returning to the moon to set up permanent lunar bases, and then to initiate human exploration of Mars and beyond. It appeared at the time that the “moon, Mars, and beyond” statement would marshal the nation in a new concerted effort. I’d like to think our symposium lent some extra impetus to that decision.

I smiled as I read about the President’s initiatives. I had much I wanted to accomplish, and the announcement by the President of the United States gave me hope that my dreams could yet come true within my lifetime.

15 Jordan Kare, “Fire in the Sky,” © Jordan T. Kare, Seattle, WA, 1981, 1986; used by permission.

21

WEIGHTLESS

AGAIN

IN 2004, ZERO-GRAVITY FLIGHTS BECAME AVAILABLE COMmercially in the United States for the first time. Prior to that, the only place the average American citizen could experience a zero-gravity flight was by flying with the Russians. Occasionally NASA extended zero-gravity flight privileges for educational purposes, or for unusual requests by Hollywood filmmakers for scenes in space, such as the scenes inside the capsule for the movie Apollo 13. Now anyone who is healthy, and a bit wealthy, can enjoy a zero-gravity experience at a cost of about $3,500 per person. Of course, if you are really wealthy, you can rent the entire plane for your family reunion or company retreat.

During my astronaut training in preparation for my first mission on Gemini 12, we affectionately referred to the plane in which we performed our weightless training as the “vomit comet.” Actually it was a hollowed-out, fully padded Air Force KC-135, the military version of a Boeing 707 jet, that pulled about two g’s each time it flew up in a steep angle into the atmosphere, where it would linger for about forty seconds before pulling another two g’s when we came down. At the top of these parabolic maneuvers, I floated free in a weightless world. Impervious to the Earth’s gravitational force, I traversed the mockup of Gemini with its open hatch in a simulation of my upcoming spacewalk. In one of my last zero-gravity training flights, we flew eighty parabolas at once. On rare occasions, a few members of the astronaut corps lost their breakfast. But my inner ear never seemed to fail me