Congressman Billybob
Thank you.
FMCDH
In a way, it's worthy of a ping to The Freeper Foxhole.
I thought I might share a bit from a mission control room perspective.
At night the control room is quiet and empty. There are only three of us working tonight and duties frequently require the other two people to work in other areas. So for a majority of the time I am alone in a darkened control room lit only by the various displays from the computers and the two large wall displays at the end of the room. The only noise is the muted whispers of the numerous fans that keep the computers cool. As I sit here tonight and look around, I see lots of displays scrolling various data, graphs, and numbers. The big screens at the end of the room are typical for most satellite control rooms. One of the screens display a big map of the world with our orbits overlaid on top, and the other is a three dimensional display of the satellite with the earth and stars in the background.
In the solitude and quite, if I strain really hard I can almost hear voices, faint echoes from the past, “main engine sequence start, that’s one small step, go at throttle up, we have liftoff” whispering their soft messages of the past to my very soul.
My mind keeps drifting back to the early hectic days of the space program. There was a bustle and flurry of activity across this entire nation as we tried to do what has never been done in the entire history of all mankind. My little control room is the end result of that monumental effort. I am reminded of a quote; "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."--Sir Isaac Newton.
Over the years the flavor/feel of the control room has changed also. When I first started, we were using the original NASA consoles with the black and white monitors, lit push buttons, and dials/meters in the panels. There also was quite a cadre' of personnel to get the job done. We had "crews" (a team of engineers) that were larger than all of the operations people here combined. All of those consoles have long been replaced. They now sit forlorn in some corner of a junkyard their sides rusting and their speakers quiet. Now a control room does not look much different than a very fancy college computer science lab. Instead of a crew of 15 or so, we now can do it with 2 (1 in a pinch).
I do miss those bustling days and flurries of paper. We had strip charts running, teletypes chattering, blinking lights and alarm bells on both the consoles and printers. Now that is what a control room should look like! Impresses the hell out of people who come in on a tour. Now a days It's just scrolling data on a workstation. When people come in for a tour, the first words that get uttered are "this is it?"
I was in a mission control room monitoring the Challenger launch. My heart still hurts from that day. Even though I was home during Columbia accident, it hit just as deeply.
The essay is obviously about the courage and indomitable spirit in rare people - especially Americans. But, I thought there was something else brilliantly woven into the essay. It's worth re-captioning. Near the end, Bill Whipple says:
But there are people who scare me - people who scare me very badly indeed, because these people have the power to kill this idea we call America.
We have turned our children's minds over to certain people who are so bitter and angry, so hateful of the country that gave them birth and safety, that their poison now fills our college campuses and has overrun entire communities. These are not loyal dissenters who rightfully question the policies of our nation, but small and diseased people who cannot understand why their fantasy ideologies are never in vogue, who can see nothing noble or magnificent on their foggy and dim and very close inner horizons. People whose anger and envy have driven them to turn all virtue into an ironic smirk, people who react to strength and morality with the revulsion born of a lifetime of failure and dark plans for revenge on the happy, the confident and the self-reliant.
I fear these people. I hate them. I hate them because they can kill our confidence, corrode our will, poison our history and make us believe we are the base, savage and dismal society they see through their cataracts of failure. These people can kill America. And they are determined to do it if we let them. And the one thing they mock and spit on, the one trait they despise above all others, is the physical and moral courage they have never known, and that is the leaden nugget of self-hatred.
There are people - Americans - who would turn this into the Land of the Guilty and the Home of the Terrified. We cannot let them do this. We simply can not.
These words are absolutely brilliant in their eloquence. Whittle speaks so splendidly to what has made and what makes this country so great. But, his words of "fear" are chilling to me. Much more so than any terrorist threat. It is within our ability to meet any physical threat. But, should we ever lose our ability to identify evil for what it is through the equivocation of values.....God help us!! I pray God continues to bless America, the American spirit, and those brave people who will defend her from enemies foreign and domestic. We must.....
Never forget!
Scientists Seek Clues in Solar Storm That Enveloped Shuttle
Remeber my tin foil Cuba particle beam theory? How about a solar particle beam?;-)
God rest your souls, crew of Columbia.