REFLECTIONS

The two NASA astronauts stranded in space for the past nine months, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, have brought space exploration back into our living rooms.

My wife, Judy, couldn’t get enough of the news coverage on the two astronauts’ return to Earth last week. It interests me, too.

I got hooked on the space race between the United States and Russia when I was in seventh grade. Our farm family got our first television in 1954. That’s when I began to follow the U.S. attempts to safely lift the rockets off the launching pad.

My memory serves me well. The Vanguard rocket only got about three feet off the pad when it began to crumble. They tried again and again, with the same result: Vanguard couldn’t make off the ground.

The Jupiter rocket was the next rocket to hopefully help the U.S. to take the lead in the space race. That didn’t happen because the Jupiter blew up on the launch pad.

It was my seventh-grade class where I gained more interest in rocketry.

On the farm, my brother and I would go to the barn and steal a 5-gallon pail that would serve as our launch pad.

We would take a 12 oz. Coke can, punch a hole in it, put a firecracker in it and light it and run like hell.

“KaaaaaBooom!!!!!!”

We repeated that rocket in the bucket trick over and over, and we were lucky we didn’t lose any fingers.

Our rocketry escapades continued with my brother and I going to the hobby shop and buying a fully assembled rocket. 

Astronaut John Glenn was my hero. He actually still is. He took his second ride into space at age 78. If I went now, I would be older than John Glenn.

I saw the first man land on the moon and hope to see another. I shook the hand of the second man to land on the moon, Buzz Aldrin.

Happy Space Trails to you!