A trajectory into space

Jun 23, 10:16 AM

“Will we commit?”

That was a parting question of the recently concluded six part series that aired on the Discovery channel, When We Left Earth which was about the formation of NASA and its decades long effort to reach into space, featuring a large amount of new quite personal footage I’ve never seen before: of the crews, inside the control room, shots from space. I was reminded of the recent photo collection of Simon Norfolk of rocket launch scenes that I really liked for the emphasis on the non-traditional focus on something other than the rockets themselves, smaller elements at more of a human scale. The picture given was of a monumental human effort by a group of thousands to do something that had never been done before. You could hardly set your sights higher, literally.

Of course, when that commitment was made it was surely done and I find that extremely compelling. It was both an engrossing series and inspiring. There are a number of things we could commit to doing on a large scale from tackling climate change to another push into space. But do we need to or will we?

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