Growing up among sleepy citrus groves near Clearwater, Florida in the 60’s and 70’s, I spent many hours immersed in stories and images of the US space program. My bedroom was awash with posters, Super-8 films and circular ViewMaster slides portraying the heroes and spacecraft of the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury missions. On a desk alongside school books sat boxes of Revell model kits; the Apollo Lunar Module and futuristic moon buses from 2001 a Space Odyssey. Novels by the movie’s screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke, and dogeared paperbacks by Ray Bradbury and other kindred science fiction writers shared a shelf, where, together, they explored worlds beyond Orion’s Belt, and spun me through galaxies where I could immerse myself in a cool sea of stars before sleep.
“Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence.”
Sometimes my family and I would pack the car and drive cross-state to Cape Canaveral, parking with hundreds of other cars along the shoulder of the road miles away from the massive gantries and launch pads. We’d anxiously wait in the humid Florida heat to see a distant spurt of orange-red flame and billowing smoke from the main-stage rockets, far off, past the coastal marshes.
I’d sit on a blanket on the car roof and stare off into the distance to see a fast-rising white plume of smoke, like an upside-down exclamation point slicing upward through a bright blue Florida sky. If you squinted just right, you could see atop the roaring, crackling mountain of noise a tiny white dot that was the shuttle itself, which only served to emphasize the ferocious energies, tamed just barely enough to hurl its frail human payload beyond the sky.
“Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.”
Years later in Houston, Texas, I’d visit the exhibits at NASA’s Mission Control Center where mission relics and moon rocks were displayed in air-conditioned halls, while outside lay rockets and boosters; giants’ toys carefully strewn across the neatly manicured lawns. The sheer bulk of the hulking tubes were mute reminders of mankind’s greatest scientific feats in “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth…”
“Hov’ring there, I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air…”
Now a not-so-little kid, and a little less lost in the wonder and dreams of spaceflight, I took it all for granted, that those giant, incredibly complex machines and their crews would always reach their goal, always safely return.
Where never lark or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
“The high untrespassed sanctity of space…”
Years later, I emigrated to Israel following another, more personal dream. There I worked, raised a family and learned of ancient ladders that also reached to the heavens and back, and, slowly forgot about the ships that sailed beyond its highest rungs.
Until February 1, 2003, when urgent news reports ripped aside the serenity, candles and prayer that marked the close of another peaceful Sabbath in Jerusalem. STS -107, Space Shuttle Columbia was lost, the radio blared, its crew killed upon reentry.
I struggled to try to find the simplest words to explain to my still-young children about the bravery of the heroic astronauts; and about Israel’s own Ilan Ramon, one of the mission payload specialists and the nation’s first astronaut. I told them about how the crew looked down upon us far, far below as they spun around the planet.
But then, somehow, because of some unknown problem, there was a terrible accident, and the astronauts had suddenly vanished in an instant in a cold, dark and forbidding place far above the world, leaving behind only ripped and blackened relics that fell to Earth as ethereal exclamation points slicing down the sky.
Not long afterward, I met with the astronauts’ bereaved families, NASA and Israel Space Agency officials at a memorial service held on a cold, windy bluff not far from Jerusalem. There, overlooking the coastal plain they planted seven frail saplings in the astronauts’ names, and held a memorial ceremony.
The cameras and microphones crowded around; the shared elegy of loss was palpable.
After the ceremony had concluded, I spoke with Ellen Husband, the widowed wife of flight commander Rick Husband as she stood alongside the towering slab of a memorial stone. I asked her if she felt that Rick, a devout Christian as was she, would have appreciated the tree planting ceremony to commemorate his memory, here in the Holy Land.
“Oh, yes… I do,” she said with conviction.
Speaking with Husband and the others, it felt as though a very personal circle had somehow closed. One sealed both with the noble dreams the astronauts and their families held tight between them, between earth and sky.
And the wrenching grief when it was torn away.
We watched Husband’s young son Matthew water the supple Pistachio sapling, one of six that rested in the dark clumps of earth before it could begin reaching above on its own.
“Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”
Somewhere, a boy of about Matthew’s age sits before a television set and watches a rocket lift off under brilliant Florida skies. And just the flames erupt, murmurs a blessing for the memory of seven heroes.
—
“High Flight” by Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee, No 412 squadron, RCAF, Killed 11 December 1941.
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