To the moon!

I get really excited about space travel. Matt and I drove down to Daytona Beach one winter break and along the way went to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, which was amazing. The idea of space travel and the fact that human expansion into the universe has been embryonic and is moving into its infancy amazes me. It fills me with awe and childlike wonder like nothing else in current human endeavour. (Except, of course, for the development of human rights jurisprudence.) I wish I could have been involved in any way in designing, engineering or piloting the space shuttle, but I'm just not smart enough. The space shuttle Atlantis took off this morning from Cape Canaveral. It's going on a ten day mission to deliver the next section of the International Space Station, a science laboratory built by the European Space Agency, a coalition of 17 countries. This section, called Columbus, was supposed to be launched in 1992, but there were some delays and then in 2003, Columbia blew up and pretty much grounded NASA for a few years. I know since then there have been a lot of problems in NASA and people are getting tired of funding something that seems to have no immediate application and seems to break all the time. I say, give them a break. This is an incredibly complex machine and there are going to be mistakes made, parts broken, delays and accidents. But what is absolutely elemental to human existence is the desire to explore the undiscovered and to understand what was previously unfathomable. Going to space is our destiny, call it the manifest destiny of humanity. It sort of rhymes if that's important to you.

Anyway, I meant to say, also the Commanders of this mission have hilarious names: Commander Stephen N. Frick and pilot Alan G. Poindexter.

I hope the following image of the take-off today inspires you: