At 9:30pm, I stood up. “Ok, I’m going outside now. Six minutes to go.”
The sky was mostly clear. It was dark — as dark as it can be with streetlights every half-block. We walked across the street and down a house or two and turned to the southwest.
Trudy held her hand up to block the glare from the headlights of a car down the street. I looked around wondering if we might sit down instead of standing. We waited. And then at exactly the appointed hour and minute, we saw a bright light flicker thru the leaves of an Oak in the distance.
I backed up a few steps until the bright light was visible over the treetops. “There it is,” I said.
Trudy looked at me and then in the direction I was pointing. A dim reddish point of light was climbing from the southwest, getting brighter and whiter with each passing second.
“It’s going right over us,” Trudy said quietly. “Right over our neighborhood.”
There are astronauts up there. What are they doing right now? Experiments maybe. Or maybe maintenance. For all I know, they might be on a spacewalk repairing some broken cable or replacing some broken box. And there are flight controllers in Houston watching the progress of that orbit, watching from a different perspective than ours.
Years ago, when we were very young, we had debates in school. Formal debates with teams and captains and judges. One of the debate topics I never quite understood asked whether or not the space program was justified. This was the seventies. We were still flying to the moon. It was so obvious to me that the topic seemed almost silly, nothing more than an excuse to form teams and have a debate. I wondered how the kids on the other side could pretend to argue the opposing view.
Resolved that the manned space program is a good thing…
Look up at that bright light passing over. It’s almost all we have now. No rockets launching astronauts into space. No space capsules reentering and splashing down. Russian rockets instead. Soviet era capsules landing hard in the steppes with a billowing burst of dust.
Dust blowing in the wind. After coming back to earth. After many orbits, ninety minutes each, just like the one that just passed over our neighborhood.