Cause for hope

This past weekend gave major cause for celebrating humankind. Space Shuttle Atlantis launched after only a minor hesitation—the final shuttle mission of a program that began nearly 30 years ago. And the Republic of South Sudan has joined the comity of nations.

I listened to the launch process Friday morning. My breath caught when the countdown was halted at just over 30 seconds. In the brief moments they took to resume, I flashed to a morning in January, 1986. I’d just got home from a run on the beach and was getting ready to do laundry when my friend Katherine called me and told me to turn on the TV.

Challenger had just exploded on launch. By 1986 shuttle launches were so “common” that a lot of news outlets didn’t cover them. But KNBC’s Kent Shocknek did, every one, and I recall him commenting on the burst of flame, “This isn’t right.” I was transfixed by the images (the way I would be 15 years later, watching the fall of the Twin Towers on British television) and felt gutted.

So I was relieved when NASA resumed the countdown Friday, even though I was thinking O-rings.

It’s sad that this is the last mission—we’re not stopping the space program, but for the foreseeable future our astronauts will be passengers on Russian space craft.

The thing about shuttle missions is how joyful their crews are—look at any photograph of any shuttle crew and their smiles will power a small city. It’s not that they don’t work extraordinarily hard to get on the mission and then to execute it; it’s that they clearly love what they’re doing. Think about your own job and compare.

(A shuttle sidebar: I watched Columbia land at Edwards Air Force Base in November 1982. It was a first date—a colleague of mine had spent the entire week informing me that he was going to drive up to Palmdale to watch the shuttle land. I kept telling him to enjoy it. Finally, around Thursday, he plaintively asked, “Don’t you want to come, too?” “I’ve not been invited.” Well, he did invite me, and we did watch the landing from about a different time zone. But it was fabulous to watch it kind of drift in for the approach. We also went to a desert wildlife center, where I was hugged by a reticulated python; but that’s another story.)

Atlantis has docked at the international space station and will head back to earth shortly. & we’ll move on to other modes of exploration. But this was a beautiful thing.

And so was the independence of South Sudan. Listen to Saturday’s NPR interview with Scott Simon and Ofeibea Quist-Arcton—she was in Juba covering the public celebration. Quist-Arcton has reported on so many stories from Africa that are truly dreadful; it’s a joy to listen to the laughter in her voice as she tells Simon about the newest nation.

It’s when she describes the flag that I really caught my breath: green for the fertile land, red for blood (more than two million killed in 20 years of civil war), black and “a golden star of freedom leading the nation.”

South Sudan has been one of the horror stories Quist-Arcton has covered over the years, and it certainly has a tough row to hoe moving forward. But on Saturday, for one brief day, there was nothing but joy.

So, well done, Atlantis and well done, South Sudan.