What captures your imagination?

Last updated on: July 26, 2019 at 6:00 pm by Jane the Actuary

What captures your imagination? 2019-07-26T18:00:40-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Space_Shuttle_Columbia_lands_at_the_end_of_STS-1.jpg; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_lands_at_the_end_of_STS-1.jpg

So the time since our return from vacation has been taken up by a lot of unpleasant and non-bloggable family stuff, here’s a little bit of something I wanted to share:

Back a week or two ago, the question floating around twitter, as tends to reappear every now and again, was, “what’s the first news event you remember?” and I began to feel really old when the response of so many people was the space shuttle disaster. (Me, I’m a Detroit girl, I guess: I remember my parents watching the news closely to see what would happen with respect to a potential Chrysler government bailout. It was approved. Mom and Dad, being Republicans, and Dad being an engineer at GM, were unhappy. This was in fall 1979, so more or less at the same time as the other news event I was vaguely aware of, but didn’t particularly understand, the Iran hostage crisis.)

And at the same time, it’s been wall-to-wall Moon Landing coverage, for the sake of its 50th anniversary.

And, what’s more, as part of the non-bloggable family stuff, over Memorial Day weekend, we made a trip back to Mom and Dad’s house that we’re getting ready to put on the market, for a final clean-out, and we brought back a bunch of old papers, including a few boxes of things in my old closet, and in a box were some newspapers that I had saved from, well, ages ago.

Yes, I had saved not just the front page but the whole front section of the Detroit News for April 15, 1981, reporting on the landing of the space shuttle Columbia.

I had also saved the sports section because its back page had more photos.

In addition, the Detroit News is (or was at the time) an evening paper delivered by traditional paperboys after school. But I had managed to acquire the morning edition as well.

And I had acquired a Detroit Free Press as well. (As Detroiters would know, the Detroit News is the traditionally conservative and the Detroit Free Press the traditionally liberal paper.) Holy moly, would’ja look at the tuition hike graphic?

And the New York Times? I don’t know how I acquired it. Did Dad bring it home? Did the local party store (it’s a Michigan thing) have newspapers and I bought one?

Clearly, these were all about the landing, not the take-off of the space shuttle, so maybe the launch had captured my attention, but too late to have saved newspapers, and the landing was known so maybe I was prepared to get (or ask Dad to get) these papers.

And I wish I had kept a full newspaper rather than just the news section (and wish the same regarding the 9/11 newspapers we kept before we knew that newspapers as we knew them would disappear).

But there it is: I was inspired enough by the promise of a new era of space exploration to have kept these papers, and find myself wondering, what inspires people in the year 2019? And yet, how meaningful is “inspiration,” anyway, given that I didn’t pursue a career in any sort of science-y field and only just periodically whined that it’s a disappointment that it’s been so long since humans have landed on the moon, let alone a planet, that I have no memories of it.

So there you have it. What do you remember, and what do you think about our future (or lack thereof) in space?

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