Godspeed John Glenn
I’m sitting at the airport waiting for my jet to load and on the TV news channel they’re showing photos of a satellite’s attempt to attach to a passing comet. My fellow passengers seem uninterested, no doubt weary of science in this Age of Cynicism. If Rush Limbaugh carried the story as another Obama over-reach, we might have some reaction here in the waiting room, but lassoing an iceball? I don’t thinks so.
We live in a world of miracles. Orbiting space stations, cures for diseases, self-driving cars, cellphones, nanotechnology , robots, instant answers on Google. We live in Science Fiction. Sticking a harpoon into Comet Moby Dick isn’t going to make anyone cut short a text message to get updates, that’s for sure.
I remember as a kid in gradeschool assembling to watch on black and white TV John Glenn’s ride into outer space. Walter Cronkite provided all the gravitas needed and us 3rd graders waited in wide-eyed awe to see if our astronaut made it back to Earth in one piece. Walter made it pretty clear what would happen if that little capsule caught fire or went out of control or hit re-entry at the wrong angle. God only knows what would’ve happened to us little witnesses if John Glenn had burned to a crisp on live TV with no grief counselors to comfort us, just a generation of scarred Baby Boomers who vowed never to fly in a plane or any other contraption that left Terra Firma.
As it was, John probably inspired half of us to be scientists, engineers or even astronauts. And Walter engendered a trust in the media that lasted almost into the 21st century before we stopped believing much of anything we read or hear in the press. Before we started questioning science itself even though we live in a world hurtling away from the past’s gravitational pull the way Glenn left the earth’s. He came back okay. We never will. And that comet …? Well, I expect I’ll have to wait til I touch ground back home somewhere in the Future. The world here might be growing smaller, but the universe is still expanding.
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