New Horizon Reappears

Fifty years ago we flew by Mars after two attempts. Men were killed going to space, going to the moon. We stood on the moon. We watched Curiosity land on Mars. Thank you NASA for sharing all this stuff. When I was in **mumble**mumble** grade, we did a big section on Apollo and by the end I could recite the timeline of the entire mission of sending a manned space craft to the moon. Can you imagine? That’s how important it was. It was thrilling. Science fiction is fun but science is what we can really do.

Tonight no television network broke in to say that we’d heard back from New Horizons but anybody who wanted to share in the excitement via NASA’s live web reporting. We got to hear Alice Bowman (APL’s First Female MOM – Mission Operations Manager) checking in with each of the systems and getting “nominal” status reports and the cheering just continued. All systems go. That’s all we needed to hear and we’ll wait til tomorrow to start seeing what New Horizon is sending back.

I’ll have to get a real quote because Alice Bowman had some good stuff in there about following your dreams.

holding our shared breath
waiting for a sign and then –
new horizon’s back!

long ago we sent
man, men and women to space
it was exciting

but reaching pluto
and flying past, hearts are cheered
what shall we find out?

discovery and
exploration and courage
hopes and dreams fly too.

take my bitter heart
show me the stars and planets
renew all my dreams.

we walked on the moon
long ago when I was young
I’m a kid again.