The View From Here
Ever Looking Upward
(August 21) Standing dockside outside Fishlips Grill in Port Canaveral, Florida -- I'm but one of several dozen diners who've left their meals to look upward together in a brief moment of communal hope. Shortly there is the thundering clap of two sonic booms, and the Space Shuttle Endeavour streaks across the Florida sky to a pinpoint landing at Kennedy Space Center. There is applause. Somehow we have briefly slipped the surly bonds of Earth together, if only in vicarious celebration of the accomplishments of Endeavour and her crew.
This spirit of space exploration - our shared sense of looking toward the stars -- will be celebrated repeatedly in the coming months, as one space anniversary tumbles upon the next. The 60th anniversary of the Air Force, the 50th anniversary of the great space race, the 50th anniversary of NASA, the 25th anniversary of Air Force Space Command, the 25th anniversary of the Space Foundation -- all will be lauded, as surely they must. But this "age of looking up" is much older than all that. And it is engrained in every one of us, locked deep within the secrets of our DNA.
Roll the clock back five days:
(August 16) It is 6:00 a.m. GMT, and dawn begins to break clear and cloudless over the gently meandering Salisbury Plain. Inside the great stone inner circle of Stonehenge, I am part of a small group granted the privilege of access. I station myself just in front of the keystone, and face the direction of the daybreak, looking intently between two giant stones on the opposite side of the circle. At 6:17 a.m., right on cue, the sun begins to crest over the distant hillside. Bright beams of sunlight stream through the slit between the giant stones, and I am struck by a dazzling burst of photons that have traveled across time and space in precisely this way for billions of years. I am seeing this through a stone astronomical device that has functioned just like this for five or six thousand years.
Clearly, we have been looking toward the sun, moon, and stars for a long, long time. Because Stonehenge is so old, no one can say for sure why the people who built it went to such great trouble to do so. After all, the stones, each weighing many tons, were quarried and transported great distances by pre-bronze-age people who invested millions of man-hours to build Stonehenge. Its construction in that time would have been an engineering feat equal to building the International Space Station today. That Stonehenge functions as an astronomical device is clear. But why such a massive and elaborate device? If all you want to do is track the solstices and equinoxes, you can do it with a few sticks. Why was this so important?
While Stonehenge is the most famous of England's stone circles, it is by no means the only one or even the most impressive one. In fact, the prehistoric people here left behind at least 900 stone circles. And where Stonehenge sits on less than two acres of land, the nearby Avebury Circle covers a whopping 28 acres, and includes a stone-ranked promenade, numerous nearby ancient dwellings and burial structures (barrows), and the mysterious Silbury Hill -- a man-made hill about the size of an Egyptian pyramid whose mysterious purpose remains unexplained. To the west, in Cornwall, the triple stone circles at The Hurlers align perfectly; a straight line drawn through their centers points to a huge stone quarry. Atop the quarry giant stones have been stacked like Oreo cookies in massive arrays that dwarf the more famous Stonehenge.
I have always believed that humanity looks toward the stars because we are "of" the stars. Our atoms were born in the same big bang that shot forth the building material of the universe all those billions of years ago. We are part of the universe in ways that can't be rationalized, studied, or scientifically explained . . . and we yearn to return. "Looking Up" predates the space age and all the anniversaries we will mark this year. It predates our nation. It predates history. It has been a part of us forever, and cannot be extinguished by politics, wars, elections, governments, science, religion or the march of time.
Those of us who live in this time and work in the space community are immensely privileged. We have learned more about our universe in the past five decades than was known in the previous five millennia. We have tools and technology at our disposal beyond what our forebears could ever have dreamed.
But dream they did. Even 5,000 years ago.
And even then, when all we had to work with was stones, we dreamed to touch the stars.
As we celebrate many important space-related anniversaries in the coming year, let us remember that the great progress of the past half-century is but a sliver in time. That our journey back toward the stars began long ago, and that it is a journey that, perhaps, can never end. But for at least 5,000 years, it has been a journey of great significance and importance -- one worthy of great effort and great sacrifice.
For those who would extend a human presence throughout our solar system -- we have been given some heavy lifting to do. Let us be as strong and persevering in our lifting as were our forebears on the Salisbury Plain.
Elliot G. Pulham
President & Chief Executive Officer
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