Experiencing Another’s Experience
I was looking through photos I had queued up in my site uploads, stacked up for application to some future thought. The choice picks from previous travels and adventures. The U.S. NASA Space Shuttle program has faded from view a bit, now that the retired shuttle orbiters are at their final places of viewing and preservation. The world is now looking to Space X and other companies and Russia to get astronauts into orbit, and other countries’ space programs are now creating headlines from time to time.
When I visited Washington, DC in 2014, I went to the Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington Dulles airport, part of the Smithsonian air and space museums. The collection is huge – it is a huge hangar type building (appropriate for airplanes) and it is tiring to see whole thing in one afternoon. I sure gave it a shot, however.
One of my treasured photos of that day is a photo I took from a point very close to the museum entrance. It was what I believe to be a young person, admiring the Shuttle from a catwalk view point after taking a photo. It may have not been a young person or child, but I have idealized this photo a bit, so that it what I have decided. It’s a bit of quiet repose, for whoever the individual was, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the moment. I certainly experienced that at different points in the museum, seeing the Enola Gay (the plane that dropped one of the atomic bombs on Japan in WWII) with the true definition of the word “awe” which includes fear, one of the Concordes, an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, and the Space Shuttle…being able to walk at eye level around the base of the shuttle as if it was parked on the tarmac.
The view reminds me of what awe, majesty, and reverence we can experience for cutting edge technologies, especially those that have taken the human race to the limits of speed and distance from the surface of the planet. Now the machines are quieted, still, safe, polished, embalmed, and oddly serving no active purpose any more. I think that’s what gives me a lot of pause in seeing these pieces in a museum – the era has passed and now we can only look back and imagine what it was like.
We will continue to pursue the new technologies and move on. It never fails. It must.