This is a guest post from Andy Law, from our marketing group. In this guest blog post, Andy shares his connection with the NASA space shuttle launches. Andy Law and Jose Moran, our graphic designer, put together this timeline using SmartDraw VP in anticipation of the 2011 shuttle launch. Read below and at the end of the post, you will find a link in order to download the SmartDraw file.
America’s space shuttle program has always had a special
significance to me. I was not yet born
when NASA’s Apollo missions sent men to the moon. From what I had learned from my grade school
history lessons, NASA’s moon missions represented America at her best, reaching
for lofty and noble goals. Watching the
media buildup to space shuttle Columbia’s first voyage in April of 1981, I saw
a way of connecting with that American experience in space flight. Up to that point in my young life, NASA’s
missions had been about unmanned probes. I had seen the captivating rust-red images from the late-‘70s Viking
landers on Mars, and Voyager 1 had just sent back spectacular images of Saturn
and her rings a few months before. But with
Columbia, the return of manned missions into space meant a link to legendary astronauts
like Alan Shepard, John Glenn, and Neil Armstrong, and her mission really
captured my imagination. And I knew I
wasn’t alone, as I started to see drawings of the space shuttle appearing on
the Pee Chee folders of the kids at school.
I didn’t wake up early enough to see the launch of Columbia
(it was at 4am Pacific Time), and only saw replays on the morning news programs. But I do remember watching Columbia touch back
down, live on TV a couple of days later, and feeling a sense of pride that it
was landing in my home state of California, at Edwards Air Force base. The wait for astronauts John Young and Robert
Crippen to come out of the orbiter felt like an eternity in kid-time, and there
was cheering when they finally emerged.
In the beginning of the shuttle program, I remember hearing
that one day shuttle launches would happen as often as every other week, that
they would become routine. We never did
reach that level of regularity, with the expense and safety requirements each
mission necessitated. But catching a glimpse
of a space shuttle launch on the evening news, or seeing video of our
astronauts in orbit, always hearkened me back to that childlike sense of
wonder, the promise that we were doing something noble and better than
ourselves. So I was sad to hear that the
space shuttle program would be coming to an end, with the upcoming launch of Atlantis
from Kennedy Space Center in July 2011 to be the final mission in the program. It felt a bit like a little loss of
childhood, and an end of an era for a nation. So in honor of the last space shuttle mission,
I offer up this small bit of tribute, a SmartDraw timeline of the major
milestones in the 30+ year history of the shuttle program that illustrate the
progress and setbacks to the program. As
this chapter in NASA’s history closes, I hope that its future programs will
continue to spark the imagination, and once again fill a nation and a world
with a sense of pride. Feel free to
share your thoughts and memories in the comment section below.
Please click the image to view in full resolution.
Download the SmartDraw timeline: NASA Space Shuttle timeline.sdr (If you do not have a copy of SmartDraw, download a free trial.)
All photos are courtesy of NASA. NASA does not promote
or endorse any products from SmartDraw LLC.
References:
www.nasa.gov
www.wikipedia.org
www.space.com
