Six Years: A Personal Requiem for STS-107, Shuttle Columbia
Elegy for Columbia
By Dave Bender
Growing up in Florida among the sleepy citrus groves, I spent years immersed in stories, images and sheer wonder at the US space program. My room was littered with posters and photos, books and magazines, Super-8 filmstrips and ViewMaster slides of the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury space shots. Plastic models of futuristic craft from 2001 a Space Odyssey; novels by Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and kindred sci-fi writers were close refuge to another, beckoning dimension for a small-town kid growing up near Tampa in the 1960s.
“Sometimes my family and I would pack the car and drive cross-state to Cape Canaveral, parking along the roads miles away from the looming launch pads, waiting anxiously to see that distant spurt of orange-red flame and billowing smoke far-off past the mangroves and coastal marsh; waiting for the luminous white arc, an ethereal exclamation point slicing through the brilliant Florida skies, memories flowing onto scratched and faded films and photographs of the era.
“Years later, as a high school student in Houston, Texas, I’d visit the museum at NASA’s Mission Control Center with it’s relics of moon shots, Saturn-V rockets and boosters; giants’ toys casually sprawled across neatly manicured lawns. The hulking fossils, reminders of man’s greatest scientific feat in reaching the moon overshadowed any thoughts of the people who made it so – their families and their friends…