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Tribute to the Risk Takers

God Speed as Angels trending upward dare to fly

Since the start of this country there have been risk takers. Some you know of others you don't, but they all took a risk to make America great.

Last Saturday morning one risk taker a freeper named Leadpenny woke early that day and being a fan of the space program decided to start a thread at FreeRepublic to alert fellow freepers that the Space Shuttle Columbia was on it's way home from a journey to space.

The crew of that shuttle had finished a 16 day journey to the heavens. Now on their way home with mixed feelings of having to leave their place in the sky. They had dreams of this journey that was about to end, many from their youth, others from duty to try and make the world a better place. They are the risk takers, strapping into a rocket ship and being blasted into space is no small thing. As Jules Verne dreamed of and wrote of two centuries before.

One can imagine the thoughts these seven people had as they were on their way home. Thoughts of moms and dads wife's and children and all the adventures they would tell them of their journey into space.

In risk comes danger and these fine men and women we're not coming home that day, instead they had another journey to go on. In the finale moments of their lives which we will never know their thoughts, we can imagine as we on earth watched for them to arrive.

Leedpenny's journey was to take a different course that day as her thread would mark a time in history of the risk takers. As the shuttle made re-entry into earth as we know it something went wrong unknown to us back home the brave space travelers were not coming home. As their amazing journey across America was marked forever in time at that thread others were filming it, watching and talking of it as they streaked across a dark early morning sky.

At 9:03 in Las Vegas a freeper put his footprint in history with his thoughts of what was seen. Little did he know that moments later over the clear morning sky of Texas the risk takers would start one last journey as angels trending upward dare to fly. God speed to those that didn't have that reunion with family and children, friends and fellow risk takers or those words spoken of love to the country they had seen from 1000's of miles above. They didn't have to because everyone already knew of their love of country and fellow man through the risk they took. The words of love was written forever in their hearts and ours.

For they in an instant saw God.