"Look Beyond Surviving, To Thriving"

July 8th, 2011
09:00 AM ET



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Letters to the President: #900 'The final shuttle'

Reporter's Note: This is my 900th letter to the president. I will continue, but the space shuttle program - as of today - will not.

Dear Mr. President,

The last space shuttle is supposed to go up today, and so I am a tad down. Barring a technical problem or weather delay, we’ll say goodbye to something that…well, just made our country seem extra special when it came to technology and exploration. And for me, it is the end of an almost lifelong fascination with that very space craft.

When I was just a boy, I used to build model rockets. And once, long before almost anyone in the general public knew what a space shuttle was, I built one. It was designed based on information that the model company had clearly gleaned from leaks in NASA and the big aerospace firms, so it was not precisely the type of vehicle we’ve watched all these years. But it was close.

I took a long time putting it together, in part because it was so unlike any other rocket I’d ever built. It seemed in some ways much more like an airplane. And the whole idea of it gliding back to earth was preposterous to a junior scientist such as I. But carefully I cut the balsa wood, and shaped the cardboard, and glued the pieces, and applied the paint until it was complete. It was supposed to launch, split into three pieces high above the Earth, and then all three were supposed to return safely - one by streamer, two by gliding. At one critical juncture, I noticed that I had glued a piece onto the craft just ever so slightly off-center, but I convinced myself that this would not matter.

When I was finally ready to launch my masterpiece, I stationed it on the pad, touched the ignition system to a battery, and it jumped toward the heavens. That was the beginning of the end. Within milliseconds, my off-center glue job created a wicked roll which turned into ever widening, wild swoops. My shuttle was transformed into a whirling dervish - a tornadic testament to a flawed grasp of physics arcing over toward the ground and eventually slamming into a farm field. It did not separate into three pieces; it shattered into twenty. And it never flew again.

I was pretty unhappy. But years later, I was also amazed the first time I saw an actual space shuttle. There it was: My model - or at least something that looked a lot like it - pointing its nose to the sky; not swirling, not swooping, but rising majestically to space, and later gliding back to Earth like a great bird. I was beside myself. It was as if I had been given a secret as a child, and now I was watching the whole world wake up to it.

This too, is the power of having a robust and ambitious space program - the ability to inspire young people to love science, to embrace exploration, to think that reaching for the stars is not silly or a fantasy, but a reasonable aspiration for mankind.

I know that plenty of people have complaints about our space program, and I respect their views. But I hope they can respect mine as well. Yes, we have profound economic problems now, and deep political divisions. We have interest groups across the spectrum with widely differing views of what we ought to do with our resources. But great nations, I think, do not derive from small aspirations. Rather, they are sustained by populations who look beyond surviving, to thriving - who nurture not merely their simplest ideas, but also their grandest notions.

So I can’t say goodbye to the shuttle program, but let me say farewell…and hope that soon enough we will once again fly on our own to the cosmos.

Regards,
Tom

Follow Tom on Twitter @tomforemancnn.

Find more of the Foreman Letters here.