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Summary (Aug 27, 2003): Exploring unknown oceans and mountains has a long tradition of capturing society's collective imagination. As explorers continue to discover new features of our Earth from space, communicating the discoveries remains a challenge.
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Cowboys and Lumberjacks By Edna DeVore, SETI Institute, Director of Education and Public Outreach
"The Space Shuttle Columbia has disintegrated over Texas on re-entry."
Like millions of others on February 1, 2003, I awoke to these tragic words and a sense of shared grief. A deep sense of sadness settled over my spirit. Seven astronauts had lost their lives in the human quest for space exploration and scientific discovery. These were men and women, fathers and mothers, scientists, pilots, explorers, discoverers, adventurers, but most of all, for me, they were heroes.
| | Space shuttle crew STS-107. Aboard Columbia were: Commander Rick Husband, 45, a U.S. Air Force colonel and test pilot, was on his second space mission, his first as the shuttle's commander. A graduate of Texas Tech University, he is married and the father of two children; Pilot William "Willy" McCool, a former Marine Corps infantryman turned U.S. Navy aviator, was on his first space flight. A native of San Diego, Calif., McCool is married and the father of three sons; Flight engineer Kalpana Chawla, a native of Karnal, Ind., and a University of exas graduate, was making her second trip into space. She is unmarried; Mission specialist Michael Anderson, a 43-year-old U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, was flying as Columbia's payload commander and was on his second space mission. A native of Plattsburgh, N.Y., he is married with children; Medical officer and flight surgeon Laurel Clark, a 41-year-old Navy commander, was mission specialist. An Iowa native, she considers Racine, Wis., to be her home town. She was on her first mission and is married with a son; Columbia mission specialist David Brown, a 46-year-old Navy captain, was on his first flight into space. Reared in Arlington, Va., Brown graduated from William and Mary, he studied medicine at the Eastern Virginia Medical School and joined the Navy; Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, is the son of a 48-year-old Air Force colonel and the son of a Holocaust survivor, was selected by his country to fly aboard Columbia as his nation's first astronaut.Image Credit: NASA |
As a child, I saw Sputnik cross the sky with my father, a cattle rancher in the rural high Sierra's of California. The space race had started. Later, I saw a comet and the Milky Way through Dad's binoculars. Wow! All those stars danced before my eyes. Normally, I used binoculars to count cattle in distant fields, or look for deer on the hillsides. I found a different universe looking up at dark skies through those lenses. My heroes began to change. My heroes had always been cowboys and lumberjacks, forest rangers and my teacher - the people who were my family and my neighbors. But, space exploration changed that, and I sought out a bigger world than my home in the valley rimmed by the snowy mountains.
A few years ago, my mother gave me a fifth-grade report that she had saved for more than 40 years. It was done with loopy childish writing, decorated with yellow stars and a rocket in flight against a blue crayon sky. The report was all about NASA. These were the days of Gemini, long before the Apollo Moon landings; the space shuttle was just a gleam in someone's imagination. My report closed with the assertion that "Someday, I'm going to work for NASA." It's funny how childhood dreams come true. I think it is because of childhood heroes.
Today, as the Director of Education and Outreach at SETI Institute, I do work on projects with NASA that reach out to children, teachers and the public. And, I've learned, again and again, that astronauts are heroes for children. My first NASA project involved working with teachers to engage them in NASA's airborne astronomy research program. Teachers came to NASA Ames Research Center for an exciting two weeks of training and immersion in astronomical research. Subsequently, they joined scientists on research missions onboard NASA's Kuiper Airborne Observatory (KAO) for observing flights eight miles up. In three years, more than seventy teachers flew on the KAO. In their home communities, many students and adults thought they were astronauts.
Some great teaching took place about how airplanes fly while rockets are propelled, and what is the nature of the atmosphere versus space. These teachers proudly took home some of the heroic qualities of being a part of NASA. They also took home Eileen Collins' autograph. At that time, she was a pilot and astronaut-in- training who they encountered at Ames Research Center. Later, Collins became the first woman to pilot a space shuttle. Today, she is a hero to many young girls and boys who aspire to fly and to explore space.
Heroes come in many walks of lives.
In their imaginations, children look up to heroes and try on their careers as they dream about different avenues toward adulthood. Some childhood heroes are entertainers - glamorous Hollywood stars or professional athletes. Others are homemakers, policemen, firemen, teachers, scientists, doctors, lawyers, business people, engineers, soldiers and more. These are the people at the core of society who make everyone's life better, and give of themselves for others. And, a few are explorers, taking risks to expand the limits of human experience and knowledge on behalf of all of us.
The explorers first ventured to walk out of Africa, and as their descendents, we populate the world. They crossed unknown oceans and mountains, and went to the poles of the planet. Today, they dive to the depths of the ocean and climb into space. The Columbia astronauts were just such people. They remain heroes for some small girl or boy who will follow them beyond Earth into space. Like all the astronauts, they were my childhood heroes, and still are.
Related Web Pages SETI Institute
Columbia Investigation
Note: Spacecraft
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