Clouds Hide Alpha --
But Not Our Destiny
Nope. No such luck. Although a moon just three days shy of full was struggling to make itself seen through the gauzy overcast, I knew there was no chance of seeing my quarry.
Not that I didn't stand there and look for a few minutes. Somehow, just knowing (thanks to a new computer program) that at that very moment, hidden behind that curtain of cloud, the space station Alpha and its crew of three were passing 250 miles almost directly overhead, made me feel like I had to stand and look up, standing on ceremony if nothing else.
Even though the human presence in space is now constant, I have rarely seen a manned spacecraft, although I am such an avid follower of the space program an editor once called me an "astronaut groupie."
I've seen maybe two orbiting space shuttles pass overhead. I've seen another two shuttles, inbound for their Cape Canaveral landing strip, blaze across the night sky, scribing a shimmering re-entry trail from horizon to horizon.
And I once was privileged to be present at "The Cape" as the shuttle Discovery thundered aloft -- standing awe-struck at the press site a scant three miles away from Ground Zero, where the white heat from the boosters washed warm across my nose and cheeks and shock waves from the tremendous release of energy whip-cracked across the torrid Florida swampscape as the ship and its precious human cargo drove relentlessly upward and outward.
I treasure every chance I get to see a spaceship carrying people pass my way.
Because I know every one of those astronauts -- they are me.
Not a mission has left that didn't take a little bit of me with it. That little bit of me goes by different names, but I'm right there, just the same.
When I was only 4, I rode a Redstone missile into a 15-minute downrage lob under the name of "Shepard." Carried on the manifest as "White," I stepped out of a Gemini capsule in 1965 to float alone and free and marvel at the luminous arc of Earth below and the diamond-spangled, jet-black velvet of eternal space above. Later, as "Armstrong," "Aldrin," "Conrad," "Bean" and eight other personae, I felt the soft, snowy crunch of the lunar regolith beneath my boots.
As "Scobee," "Smith," "Onizuka," "McNair," "Resnik," "McAuliffe," and "Jarvis," I died 73 seconds after liftoff on an icy morning, aboard a ship named Challenger. The icy grip of that death seizes my heart anew even to this day, every time an ascending shuttle acknowledges "Go at throttle up."
And now, penciled in on the watch bills in names too numerous to list, I ride the thunder aloft, again and again and again, to unbuckle my harness, and float weightless as a dust mote to a cabin window and look out at the borderless, cloud-swashed canvas of sea, mountain, desert, city and jungle that is the place of my birth -- but not of my Destiny.
My -- Our -- Destiny lies out the other window, where the moon and the stars and the planets shine hard and real and unwavering, their uncertain twinkle left far below, beneath Earth's all-distorting atmosphere -- distant beacons in the endless reaches of space beckoning with a solid certainty that I -- under names yet unspoken, with faces whose distant ancestors are only now taking their first breaths on Cradle Earth -- will one day dance among them as confidently as I today walk the Gulf beaches of my birth planet.
Yes, somewhere above that cloud deck tonight, as I stood in that parking lot looking skyward -- somewhere right overhead, right then, right that very moment -- the second crew of Space Station Alpha was forging its particular link in the endless chain leading humanity inevitably to the stars.
I never saw them. But I was with them.
