Sorry for the bad delay... Roadrunner's FTP was all messed up. Yeah, excuses are like assholes. Etcetera.

Sigh... Columbia. I saw Columbia's first launch--the first Space Shuttle launch--in kindergarten. Up to that point the born-in-the-70's generation hadn't seen any space launch. The various 60's-era space program had ended a few years before and I think we were probably too young to have absorbed any capsule launches if we were around for them. It was impressive, a tiny bit of history at least. All the big stuff had been taken care of during Apollo and Mercury missions, but we didn't know that the Shuttle was mostly a revolution in delivery. Most of the earlier program had consisted of disposable parts and the Shuttle was going to be mostly reusable. The orbiter landed on wheels, on a runway. It was all pretty cool looking.

We watched the landing too, which seemed less impressive and sort of an afterthought. Tell a bunch of kids that the Space Shuttle is going to land and you see the bewildered looks of those that never considered that it was going to do otherwise. Later we heard about reentry and the various issues involved in such a thing, but it was never more than an afterthought or a plot device. I figure most folk outside of NASA never considered it that big a deal.

Also saw Challenger's first launch, which had the added novelty of a new Space Shuttle thrown into the mix. By the time it exploded most of us weren't watching these things at school. We'd seen it all quite a few times. A teacher walked into my classroom with one of those Looks on her face and told us the Space Shuttle had just exploded. The news was probably a minute old by then. We weren't horrified, but there was a certain level of disbelief that anything really bad could happen. But something really bad did happen. And that was the mission with the teacher in it.

Last launch I watched was John Glenn's. I'm infected with the "They should have sent Chuck Yeager up there" disease but there was that thing--how wonderful it was that John Glenn was going back into space. He came back okay. This 7 didn't. Included in that 7 was the first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon. NASA likes to give the media a hook for more converage of shuttle missions, and Ramon was it. I was glad to hear it...

And a lot of the Arab world was glad to hear that he was a couple hundred pounds of the debris that rained down yesterday. We aren't going to punish them for their Big Talk. But it serves as a reminder that evil exists and runs entire countries.