Growing Up in History's Flight Path

OVIEDO, Fla.

The sonic boom of Discovery's return last month shook our neighborhood more than 50 miles from the Kennedy Space Center shuttle landing site, demanding that I take notice.

It had taken a move from the Midwest to a fantasy land where most people work either for a cartoon mouse or a company engaged in space exploration to shake me out of my complacency.

The space program and my generation grew up together. In our homes we hovered around new black-and-white Zenith televisions to catch liftoffs and launches. We squinted at fuzzy images of astronauts flat on their backs strapped into a coffinlike capsule. In central Ohio, we watched with mixed emotions as our boy, Neil Armstrong, walked on the moon.

Preachers prayed and discussed the space race from the pulpit. Farmers gathered at the co-op and talked about weather, soybeans and how much propulsion it takes to escape Earth's gravity. Little kids on the playground traded make-believe cowboys and Indians for astronauts vs. cosmonauts.

My generation grew up thinking of Apollo and Mercury as rockets, not Olympian gods. Our gods had names like John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, James Lovell Jr.

Space travel was mythic, not mundane.

In October 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik and rocketed us into a new era. Historian Bill Angel, an Ohio State University professor and acquaintance, tells of his fifth-grade teacher's frustration with her students' math skills. "Russian kids your age know fractions, and most of them know algebra, too," Angel remembers her telling the class. "So, if you want to help your country, you guys had better buckle down."

With Russia's achievement, confidence in the U.S. education system eroded, and by the 1960s the federal government was pouring money into programs to bolster science and math curriculums. Baby boomers reaped the rewards.

In 1958, I attended first grade, sitting in the same old-fashioned wooden desks that my mother had occupied three decades before. Then the school district tore down the old building, and for my second year, I entered a sleek, single-story steel-and-brick school. Our sleepy little farming community moved into the new age.

I worried about Russian space dogs and American space monkeys. My parents worried about the United States' Cold War adversary taking the lead in this race to the moon. To most adults, the space race was a sprint for a strategic military advantage. They didn't think about the potential benefits of technology developed to explore the New Frontier and never dreamed that someday the United States and Russia together would build and maintain a space station. For them the key to the future lay hidden, tucked inside a nuclear payload on an intercontinental ballistic missile.

As a child, I felt my parents' apprehension mixed with my own awe and excitement. Our teachers showed us dehydrated ice cream and passed the foil package around our classroom so we could each taste a space treat. Mom gave in to my brother's nagging and bought a jar of Tang so we could drink what the astronauts drank. Boys signed up for 4-H rocket projects and girls studied science, math and possibilities.

Although I didn't jump at the chance to be an engineer, the space program was to make my life as a faculty secretary light-years happier. The upgrade from Selectric typewriters and carbon copies to personal computers and inkjet printers felt like a "Star Trek" jump into hyperspace. My career as a freelance writer benefits from digital cameras, cellphones, computer microchips, wireless interfaces, satellites, GPS and the Internet -- all gifts from the space race.

More than 1,400 inventions, gadgets and technologies are NASA spinoffs. The space agency gave us lasers, magnetic resonance imaging, flame-retardant fabric, even toilet technology. The ultrasound used routinely in prenatal care came from the space program. Voice-controlled wheelchairs, heart pacemakers, gas analyzers, automated urinalysis, laser angioplasty all stem from NASA experts' work. The automated insulin pump became a personal favorite NASA spinoff when my young son's Type 1 diabetes was diagnosed. His own favorites included theme park rides at G-force speeds, using space technology.

Our language changed; space-age terminology quickly became everyday idiom. "Roger that." "A-OK." Countdown. Splashdown. Zero-G. Apollo 13's thrilling dance with death gave us the unforgettable understatement "Houston, we have a problem."

When the government wanted to reduce funding and scrap space exploration, Americans -- many of them baby boomers -- rose up to protest. Our dinner table discussions spilled over into the street, around water coolers at work and in letters to our government representatives. The rumblings made it all the way to the Oval Office. We fought to save the Hubble Space Telescope, which literally opened up new universes to us, with similar grass-roots efforts.

Costs and risks didn't deter my generation from its devotion to space exploration. We grieved for Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee when they died in a fiery launch-pad accident. Years later, we watched our color television as the space shuttle Challenger blew apart before our eyes, and more recently, as a piece of foam cost a Columbia crew their lives.

Yet, Grissom's words ring true: "If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."

On Independence Day, my husband and I stood in our tiny Florida yard and once again felt the wonder of possibilities, the hope of things to come, and the reunion with childhood memories. A coppery flash streaked across the eastern sky, leaving a billowing trail. Any day now, we will watch as the space shuttle Atlantis, too, becomes a tiny dot that winks and then vanishes on its way to tomorrow.