Max Peck Retires

I mean, John Young retires:

John Young, who walked on the moon and later commanded the first space shuttle mission, is retiring from NASA this month at 74 years old. The Orlando native first flew to space in 1965 on a Gemini mission with the late Gus Grissom. In 1972, he walked on the moon in the next-to-last Apollo flight. Almost a decade later, Young and pilot Bob Crippen took Columbia on its maiden voyage. The National Air and Space Museum in Washington plans a special celebration in Young's honor on Tuesday.

IIRC, Young was part of the "New Nine", the second class of American astronauts.  I didn't know anything about him when I watched Columbia lift off for the first time in '81, but I was still in awe of a man who would test a new machine in space.

Back in '76 I had debated the merits of the shuttle program in my language arts class at Maumee Valley Country Day School--I was on the "pro" side, and a good friend was "con" (our teacher declared it a draw, much to my dismay).  A few years later I'd seen the first moving pictures of Jupiter's Red Spot, compiled from data sent back from Voyager 1.  It was a giddy time for space geeks like me.

To see the first re-usable spacecraft finally ready for primetime was wicked cool.  I remember watching the landing in Mr. Buckenberger's 7th grade science class, in the same place where I'd learned all about Voyagers 1 and 2 in the first place (Carl Sagan's Cosmos notwithstanding).  I thought NASA could do anything.  Yet five years down the road I sat with the rest of Mrs. Zuchowski's high-school physics class and sadly watched the endless replays of Challenger exploding 71 seconds into its flight (Zuch had been part of the "Teacher in Space" program).

Back to '81.  The A&P grocery store down the road from us went up in flames at the same time Columbia left the pad on its maiden voyage.  We saw billows of black smoke crossing our front yard and we joked that was from the launch.  Then my friends and I rode our bikes down to the store to watch the firefighters put out the blaze.  I never imagined that I would watch the ship disintegrate in flame, live on TV over 20 years later.

My thanks to John Young and all the astronauts for taking risks to broaden our understanding of the Cosmos.  As Gus Grissom himself said:

Our God-given curiosity will force us to go there ourselves because in the final analysis only man can fully evaluate [space] in terms understandable to other men.

Ah, the good old days when we had grand national priorities.  If only we could scare up a few billion these days to expand knowledge instead of blowing shit up...

ntodd

PS--Bonus points to anybody who gets the post title.