LETTER: Is flight worth the price?
It was Sept. 9, 1994. I’d driven non-stop from Logan to the NASA Kennedy Space Flight Center for nearly 40 hours, then slept restlessly in a small pup tent atop my sleeping bag. In the sweltering heat of the Florida summer, ‘slept’ probably isn’t the right word.
Now I stood under the corrugated steel awning of the press stand for Kennedy’s twin launch pads. Three miles away, the sound from Space Shuttle Discovery’s rocket engines vibrated that corrugated steel against its metal framework. The popping rumble from the engines and the buzz from the awning made it difficult to hear the acclamations of awe. As I watched her rise, literally into the heavens, I squinted against the painful brilliance of the fiery plume. It hurt, but I would not look away.
The experience overloaded all my senses. And my emotions! In her payload bay was an experiment. An experiment I built over several years. And I built it in the basement of Utah State’s SER building. Since that culmination of my education, I’ve orbited satellites around Earth and landed robots on Mars.
I read the article in Monday’s Statesman about the chartered flight for USU’s football team. The Statesman reported assistant coach Jeff Copp as saying, ‘the time saved and the benefits to the players and coaching staff are well worth the price.’
The price, Mr. Copp, is less funding that could go toward science, technology, engineering, mathematics and other worthy educational programs. And I, sir, respectfully disagree that a couple hours of extra sleep is well worth that price.
-Mark Wilkinson