Credit: Associated Press Photo

Being a science journalist does occasionally have its perks, like being allowed on site for a NASA shuttle launch.

With five minutes and counting to liftoff on Saturday evening, I left the news office at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and hurried down to the grassy lawn next to NASA’s famous countdown clock to watch Discovery blast into space. According to a NASA VIP guest list, watching somewhere on KSC with me that night was the Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, Maud Olofsson—no doubt in attendance to witness the ascent of his fellow countryman and astronaut, Christer Fuglesang—and Joey Fatone, a former member of the band N Sync.

It was my first time seeing a NASA shuttle launch, and even though I had watched video of past night launches so I’d have an idea of what I was in store for, it didn’t quite prepare me for what I actually saw.

Discovery’s launch dazzled. One minute the evening was dark, and Discovery was still on its pad, illuminated by bright ground lights like the star of some Broadway show. The next moment, flames were erupting from the shuttle’s twin boosters and Discovery was wreathed in thick, curling smoke. A heartbeat later, I heard the dull roar of the shuttle’s engines and then Discovery was off the ground. The shuttle shot spaceward, arcing like a flare and leaving behind it a cloudy trail that darkened and expanded before dissolving away. Discovery floated higher and higher until it was just a pinprick in the night sky, and then it was gone.

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Later that night, NASA held a news conference to discuss Discovery’s successful liftoff. NASA chief Michael Griffin was one of the panelists. Earlier in the week, an article in the Times questioned the purpose of the International Space Station (ISS), where Discovery was heading:

“Once again, the shuttle Discovery is about to blast into space. And once again, it will dock with the International Space Station, and astronauts will continue the process of building the half-completed orbiting laboratory in a mission full of daunting challenges.

“But the majesty of the first nighttime liftoff in more than four years, now scheduled for Thursday just before 9:36 p.m. Eastern time, will not dispel a question that has long been the subject of sharp debate among experts: What is the space station for?”

During the postlaunch news conference, a reporter asked Griffin to describe how the ISS fit into the big picture of space exploration. His reply to the reporter could easily have been interpreted as an answer to the Times article as well.

“The questions about the space station were very appropriate. I asked many of them myself early in my career when the United States lacked plans for going beyond the space station,” he began.

Paraphrasing a quote by Navy Admiral Harold Gehman Jr., the chief of the NASA Accident Investigation team that investigated the Columbia tragedy in 2003, Griffin said: “‘For the foreseeable future, space travel is going to be expensive, difficult and dangerous, but for the United States it is strategic. It is part of what makes us a great nation.’ I believe that.”

The ISS is not a goal in itself, he continued, but a stepping stone in the United State’s larger ambition of returning to the Moon, and going beyond, to Mars.

“On the space station, we will learn how to live and work and space. We will learn how to make hardware survive and function for three years, that we’re going to need if we’re going to go to Mars. The space station is on the footpath toward becoming a spacefaring nation,” he said. “Similarly, if we’re going to go to Mars, if we’re going to go beyond, we have to learn how to live on other planetary surfaces and use what we find there, to bend to nature to our will, just like the pilgrims did when they came to what is now New England.

“The pilgrims, if you might recall, half of them starved the first winter. There was a reason their celebration was called ‘Thanksgiving.’ They were only a few thousand miles from home, and they were people who farmed for a living, and yet when they came to a new arena, they didn’t know how to farm, they didn’t know what food would grow and what food wouldn’t, they didn’t know what food they could eat.

“We’re going to have to learn how to live and survive in other places. The Moon is a stepping stone on that path. When you bring it all together, the space station, the moon, looking forward past that to Mars, these are the steps that we have to take if we want to become a spacefaring nation. I think that we should want that. I want that. I want that for the American people, for my grandchildren, for my great grandchildren.

“NASA is the arm of the federal government that takes on this task. We do it as well as we can,” he said. Bringing it back to the night’s launch, Griffin added “Sometimes we stumble. Today we didn’t stumble.”

This entry was posted on Monday, December 11th, 2006 at 2:41 am and is filed under Space & Astronomy, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.