Rockets…

Warning... This post starts with "when I was a boy"...

When I was a boy if I wasn’t drawing fish, I was drawing rockets. Outer space was the most thrilling adventure of the day, and we were going to the stars - we really were.

So how did we get here? The space race gone, moon landings done with, and Mars still a distant planet where no man has ever walked.

Even that most boring of space programmes, the working shuttle programme, is no more; the shuttles shuttling off to gather dust in various American museums (sorry couldn’t resist). Shuttle Enterprise, the first orbiter built, will tour around, Discovery will go to the Udvar-Hazy Center, Endeavour will go to the California Science Center in Los Angeles and Atlantis will be displayed at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex in Florida.

Yawn!

The shuttle never quite caught my imagination in the same way the Gemini and Apollo programs did. Part of it is my age – I’ve known better. I was five when Telstar was launched, and that opened everybody’s minds and imaginations to the promise of space travel. Even my mum and dad were excited by it all, at school we talked about nothing else. It even caught my gran’s attention: “It’ll come to no good, it’ll change nothing in the end.” She’d say. Who knows perhaps she was right.

Up until then space travel had pretty much all been science fiction, but Telstar and the space race changed all that. Suddenly we could blame Telstar for the poor weather, then the Russians, then those silly Americans for landing on the moon.

And perhaps there really were Aliens after all… "Klaatu barada nikto" 

By the time the shuttle came along I was in my early twenties and in my mind it was already all over. The shuttle just a plane that flew into space, not the exciting streamlined, fine-finned, rockets of my boyhood imagination. Yes, they said it would mean space travel for all, our ticket to the planets of the future, the building block of a new orbiting world high above the Earth – but it didn’t happen, and I never really expected it to. Yes, even then I knew that it wasn’t really going anywhere – certainly not to Mars.

Retrospectively, I understand the role the shuttle played but even so, a part of me (the boy part of me) says 'good riddance’ - let's get on with proper space travel now. Let's go to the stars in those flying saucers that we all know the major the governments have hidden in hangers in deserts, forests, and under ice caps all over the planet - finding, stealing, or trading for them with aliens.

What really does come next I wonder?

Strange to think that I’ve lived through pretty much all of the great space adventure from Telstar to… well what? It feels like nothing. Is it nothing? It can’t really be over can it? We were going to the stars, man was going to live on the moon, we were all going to travel to work in cars that floated – even if we were never really going to teleport.

The boy in me wants to believe that one day I'll ride a hover scooter, once the ancient Egyptian anti-gravity secret is allowed to be made public. The boy in me wants to find little green men on Mars. The boy in me wants to spend his days drawing rockets with fins, satellites with sticky-out aerials, and flying saucers.

So on such a wet and windy day that’s what I did.