Naturally, I missed it....

Here I am all ready to watch Atlantis lift off LIVE (something I haven't done since I watched John Young and Bob Crippen on the first Space Shuttle flight, when I was 13, in 1981) and I wind up photocopying a recent decision from the Appellate Division 1st Department from the New York Law Journal, when the whole spectacular thing happens.

I will have to catch STS-122 on NASA TV when I get home after the gym tonight. It is never as exciting, though, to watch a shuttle launch after the fact. It is a bit like watching a recorded football game. Interesting, yes, but somehow slightly lacking in goosepimples.

I am thinking I might need to get one of these to keep an eye on the comings and going of Mankind in the evenings. I have noticed that there is a whole universe visible above the orange city lights of Stamford, Connecticut. Who'd have thought that such a thing was possible in New England?

I know I never did. That is, until I got out of the car one night and idly looked down at the light on the ground. And then I looked up. (Click below.)

Gentlemen, start your engines...

Book done, back from Houston, and all caught up on work, I find myself able to blog again, and to breathe.


Houston was wonderful. Warm, huge, and friendly. Apart from the cabbies, who had no idea where they were going most of the time, and when presented with a Mapquest map (by the friendly folks at the Hotel ZaZa) were not quite able to read it sufficiently to travel even a few short blocks.


I was only in the city two days, so my chance to sample the city's culture was limited mostly to migas and visits to two excellent musuems--the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Menil Collection--and an afternoon at the Johnson Space Center--which brought back all sorts of starry-eyed memories from childhood, when I was scheduled to be an astronaut. Perhaps, if I had stuck with astrophysics in college I would be busy up there, right now.

No life is without regrets. And none lacks its consolations. If I were orbiting the Earth, for instance, I might never have bumped into you.

...

Even so, as we stare at the stars tonight, whatever our choices, or beliefs, let us remember the folks on STS-122, as they begin a new voyage tomorrow.



Safe journey.