Web Notes Online

It has been almost 50 years now, but I can remember going out in the backyard of our house in Oak Harbor, Washington State and peering up into the sky. I was told to watch for a faint blinking light that would travel across the sky right over our heads.

At first all you could see was the blanket of stars that filled the night sky. Then, there it was, a dim light that tracked across our field of vision. The Russian satellite sputnik was passing overhead. The sky would never be the same again.

I thought about that night many years ago as I drove down Rte. 313 last Saturday night to find a clear view of the eastern horizon. I had just heard that the Space Shuttle Discovery as indeed going to launch from Cape Canaveral. It had been delayed several days by bad weather. Now it would take off with a rare night time launch. Its path would take it up the East Coast and make it possibly visible on the eastern horizon.

I found a spot, pulled off the road onto the shoulder and waited. The sky over Caroline was a lot more active than over Oak Harbor, Washington State years ago. There were several jets heading off to Europe and lights from power lines and microwave towers blinked in the distance. I didn’t know if I would be able to see it. I was here, I thought. I might as well wait until there was no longer any hope of viewing it.

I sat in the car with the window rolled down. I tried to ignore the cars that paraded passed, their headlights either shining in my face from the front or reflected into my eyes from my rearview mirror.

Then, there it was. It couldn’t be anything else. A steady light, about a hand’s width above the tree line moved a crossed the sky from south to north. It moved more rapidly than a plane or helicopter. You could tell it was at a great distance. It was the space shuttle.

The blinking light I had seen many years ago had been the size of a basketball and weighed about 183 pounds. The Discovery was the size of an airliner and weighed 4.5 million pounds at liftoff (including fuel) with a crew of seven men and women astronauts.

Back in 1957 my imagination didn’t let me dream that I would casually watch as seven people took a ride into space on a late fall night. I sat there for a moment after the light had passed into the distance up the coast. I was reminded again of cars making their way up and down the road with their own missions in mind. I started the car, turned around and went home.

You can learn more about the shuttle mission by going to the NASA website: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html

They also have information about sputnik at http://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/

A copy of this article will be in my blog and the links will be hot if you want to access the NASA site that way.

Back to more Web related topics next week in our Christmas Eve issue.

As always you can reach me at rpolk@chespub.com. You can also leave a comment on the blog.