Rush – Countdown
An evening pause: The video focuses on a shuttle launch, but I think the words apply to all launches, and especially to those that break new ground.
Excitement so thick you could cut it with a knife
Technology…high, on the leading edge of life
Hat tip Commodude.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
I grew up watching shuttle launches, and actually saw one land in person at Kennedy many, many moons ago. That song still gives me the chills, because I remember the national excitement of the shuttle program. One of my high school teachers was the alternate to McAuliffe to go on the Challenger. I still remember where I was and what I was doing when that bird blew.
Then reality sets in, and like the article below on SLS, I remember that it was a 1960’s concept that didn’t actually fly until the 1980s and sucked the life out of NASA along the way.