If nothing else, Buzz Lightyear certainly has lofty goals, as should we! I do not know if Elon Musk was ever a Toy Story fan, but he certainly shares Buzz’s lofty aspirations. What he has just demonstrated is his unique ability to dream, imagine, plan, and execute. This weekend’s momentous achievement with the launch and recovery of his Falcon 9 first stage rocket, coupled with the successful docking of the Crew Dragon capsule with the International Space Station was breathtaking to say the least. One aspect that really caught my attention was the technology involved. As I think back to the Apollo missions and the fact that they had less onboard computing capability than my Garmin watch, many times less in fact. Such were the days of slide-rules and mechanical gyros! I have little doubt that this public/private partnership between SpaceX and NASA will yield even more dramatic results as we set our sights on establishing a Lunar base as a stepping stone to Mars, and as Buzz says, “Beyond!”
America is back in the space business, big time, and we should all be thankful for the leadership that has brought us here. There will always be cries for other things in which to invest America’s wealth, but without the challenges of science, discovery, and the exploring of the unknown, we can only hope to be a shadow of what technological brilliance might enable. So many remarkable advances across an array of fields in medicine, technology, communications, computing and more have been the product of our ability to dream big and execute on a scale unique to this country.
I confess to being a space junky from way back in 1957 when my dad and I stood outside as we watched a tiny white light, Sputnik, cross the night sky. Later, in 1962 we would turn on all our lights and watch as John Glenn would pass overhead and declare Perth “the city of lights”. Everyone had made the city so bright as to be easily visible to Glenn as he traversed the blackness of space. I was hooked! I had the extraordinary privilege of meeting the Mercury Seven astronauts at a dinner in Los Angeles celebrating twenty-five years since their epic feats. John Glenn could not attend as he was dealing with Senate matters, his new vocation as Senator Glenn. My good fortune was the result of a project with which I was involved that brought me in contact with a member of the Space Science Center in Los Angeles. I was asked to assist Mercury Seven astronaut “Deke” Slayton, picking him up at the airport and taking him around town and to the event. Having that time with Major Slayton, and meeting the others who attended, was the culmination of a dream. Seeing astronauts Behnken and Hurley comfortably move around the commodious Crew Dragon was a far cry from the Mercury capsules that had to accommodate Deke and his fellow Mercury astronauts.
It was following the 1986 tragedy of the space shuttle Challenger, that I would get drawn into a foundation that was in response to the Bill, sponsored and passed (I believe it was Rep. Bob Dornan) to establish a memorial to the pioneers of space, to be built on The Mall in Washington D.C. After painstaking weeks of canvasing various corporations in the space industry, I concluded that we needed a prominent figure to join our efforts as chairman. Captain Eugene (“Gene”) Cernan, the last man to leave his footprint on the moon was prominently featured on television, so I called his office, and called, and called for three months. His secretary was always very nice, and finally Gene got on the phone and said, “you’re not going to stop calling me, are you?” I told him why I was calling, and he agreed to meet me “for half an hour” in the Continental executive lounge at Houston’s airport. I would succeed in getting him to come on board as chairman, but sadly politics between Senators, Jake Garn, Bill Nelson, the USAF, and Jean Scobie would pull our efforts apart, and the Washington memorial on The Mall would never become reality. Gene would, however become a good friend whose help I would later engage for a company I would join, and for which he would be a guest speaker at several corporate events. I would also join him on trips to Cape Canaveral as I needed assistance to meet the base commander; I was trying to do some work at the time with Lockheed Martin Space Systems. On one occasion, back in the wonderful days prior to 9/11, I was in my car and Gene took me on a tour of all the old launch sites as well as the shuttle launch pads, 39A in particular. Back then, having received my federal security clearance, I was able to drive freely around most of the complex. On this occasion, we stopped by the Saturn V rocket that used to be cradled on its side near the enormous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). Gene simply would not get out of the car; he was so saddened by the way congress had abandoned the Apollo program after his last moon landing. It would become a major focus all his life to see the American space program re-energized, and on track to exploring new frontiers. I can only imagine his delight at watching yesterday’s milestone crossing, from his heavenly vantage point. Perhaps my most treasured memory of my time with Gene, particularly as a fellow pilot, would be when he would fly to Tampa to pick me up, and we would fly together to the Cape. Gene passed away January 16, 2017, and I like to think that he is now exploring the heavens in ways he could never have imagined.
Many astronauts speak of their spiritual experiences in space. Gene spoke about his experience in looking back at earth from the moon, as being “on God’s front porch”. Others speak in similarly effusive terms when describing the magnificence of God’s creation when viewing earth from space. Still others like Jim Irwin would experience the real sense of Christ’s presence, as his wife Mary recalls. An experiment was not deploying properly. Suddenly Irwin experienced the presence of Jesus Christ in a remarkable way, unlike anything he ever felt on earth. “The Lord showed him the solution to the problem and the experiment erected before him like a little altar.” Mary says, “He was so overwhelmed at seeing and feeling God’s presence so close.” She continued, “At one point he turned around and looked over his shoulder as if He was standing there.” I know, all too well, what that feels like, when my family and I were involved in a horrible traffic accident. That palpable and calming presence so near, is difficult to describe.
Where exactly is heaven? Of course, we do not know, but I think that science and religion are moving closer and closer together, and perhaps we might arrive at some possible answers. In Revelation 21:1 (NIV) we read; “Then I saw ‘a new heaven and a new earth,’ for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.” Notice that the text does not say a renewed heaven and earth, but a “new” place entirely. Randy Alcorn in his book Heaven does a good job of researching and describing all that, as Christians we hope for beyond the here and now. His biblically based explanations provide a wonderful read for anyone asking, “what comes next?”
Theoretical physics has for some time postulated a Big Bang theory, a cosmological model in which our universe originates some 13.7 billion years ago in a massive explosion, or singularity – “a point of infinite density and gravity – from which super-hot gases expand in an extremely rapid initial period of inflation.” Following the initial expansion (inflation period), the new universe cools down sufficiently to allow the formation of subatomic particles, and later simple atoms. Giant clouds of these primordial elements (mostly hydrogen, with some helium and lithium) later coalesced through gravity, eventually forming early stars and galaxies.” (Wikipedia).
As I understand it, this event occurs when time does not yet exist, and at no specific place! Puzzling, if not mind-bending, and for Christians and scientist alike we must ask, “what came before?” Science struggles with just such questions, as do we, for if we continue to go back, and back ad infinitum, we are still left with the question, “what, or who if not a creator God, originated something from nothing?” There is no end to the questions, and an insufficiency of answers. I have just concluded watching two presentations on String Theory, those proposed vibrating loops and open ended “strings” of energy that are suggested to make up sub-atomic particles such as Quarks and Leptons. The extremely learned professors gave excellent presentations including very instructive visuals which even I could follow. At least up to the point when they displayed the streams of formulae that comprise efforts to find a unified theory; something that ties it all together. Nonetheless, at the conclusion the lead presenter had to admit that, thus far, they have been unable to create evidence of this missing link. Even the Large Hadron Collider (CERN) in Switzerland, the largest particle accelerator in the world, has failed to show evidence, even after the miraculous revealing of the Higgs Boson just a few short years ago. Perhaps some secrets are not to be revealed to us; at least not yet. Once again, I believe that at some point science must conclude that the suggested happenstance nature of everything simply cannot explain the mysteries of the micro and macro universe. Without a creative force, we will always be pushing the boundary of the next question; “so what came before that?”
Was our boundless universe prior to the Big Bang truly empty, or was it filled with some particle that became converted at that point, some remnant of which we are yet to discover? Even if, who or what put them there, and who or what pulled the trigger that would set it all in motion?