Blast off!

OUR OPINION
Published: July 30, 2008

This week the National Aeronautics and Space Administration celebrates its 50th anniversary.

This might not seem like that big a deal. Gone are the days when people would crowd around the television set to catch a glimpse of a space shuttle, hurtling upward through the sky toward space.

Now, it takes a disaster to get people to tune in to the happenings of this space organization.

But the anniversary of NASA should not pass by without appreciation. The existence of this organization is unprecedented in human history.

Think about it. The United States of America has a branch of the government that is devoted to space. Up until fairly recently in human history, humankind had to study and debate space from the
confines of the ground. Study was done from miles away through telescopes and the naked eye.

But in the 20th century, we created an organization that not only studies space, but explores it and utilizes it. Space shuttles made regular flights outside of the Earth, our home. An International Space
Station has human beings living in space. The existence of NASA and its accomplishments are not only unprecedented, but incredible — out of this world!

NASA has had its moments of tragedy. The loss of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles so dramatically demonstrated the risk of traveling into space, something that had seemingly become
routine.

But the organization has bounced back from those incidents and continued to demonstrate its usefulness with other projects, including its unmanned exploration of Mars.

NASA’s 50th anniversary should not pass by without reflection and celebration. In the 21st century humankind regularly travels into space, and we know things about the Universe around us that would
have left people of only a few centuries ago speechless and terrified.

Look up this week and gaze at the blackness of space. It is still far away and foreign, but because of NASA, we understand it a little better and it has ceased to be a place of myth.