It’s not easy to pick a pumpkin in the dark. But given my sometimes unconventional work schedule, it’s necessary to engage the simpler parts of life when ever I can to maintain work-life balance. But late-night excursions can reap unexpected rewards.
I walked through the pumpkin patch off a gravel road south of Prairie City with my girlfriend, the flashlight apps on our iPhones illuminating the scattered vines. We found our soon-to-be jack-o-lantern and cut the stem with a stiff pair of pruning sheers. We put the pumpkin in a steel wagon and wheeled it back to our car.
After packing away our prize in the trunk, we turned off our flashlights and could not help but look up. The dark zone in rural Iowa offered a spectacle. The cloudy band of light originating from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy was easily visible. The constellations Sagittarius, Copernicus and the Large Magellanic Cloud dotted the sky overhead.
I pulled out a stellar map app on my phone to get information about the star Fomalhaut in the constellation Pisces. It gave me the “stellar coordinates” measured in right ascension and declination. I could see its visual magnitude — or how bright it looks to us here on Earth — and luminosity — or it’s actually brightness. This star happens to be the equivalent of 16 Suns.
The world’s space-faring nations have had two space-related setbacks — one resulting in a pilot’s death — within the last week. The Antares rocket which exploded just seconds after ignition Oct. 30 in Virginia was carrying 5,000 pounds of supplies and experiments to the international space station. The company contracted to operate and provide the rocket for the NASA mission, Orbital Sciences Corporation, manually aborted the launch after finding a catastrophic malfunction. To avoid hurting anyone they detonated the $200 million rocket so it would not crash over a populated area.
Test pilot Mike Alsbury died and his co-pilot was injured last week after the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo prototype caught fire and crashed in the Mojave desert. These are both examples of private companies beginning to set the stage for the commercial space age. These setbacks cannot deter other entrepreneurs or the U.S. taxpayer-funded missions at NASA from continuing to push the boundaries of our capabilities.
Exploring space beyond low-earth orbit is and will always be expensive, tedious and assuredly dangerous, but when humans find that first microbe in the oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa or a familiar DNA signature frozen in time on a comet, our perspective, philosophies and world will change. And that change will be profound.
In a day in age when mainstream culture is embracing the once nerdy realm of “Star Trek,” “Marvel/DC Comics” and the mind-bending space travel epic of Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,” I believe we are on the verge of renewed enthusiasm with science. Just as “Buck Rogers,” “The Twilight Zone” and “The Outer Limits” ignited imaginations to the adventure and mystery which lies beyond our stellar neighborhood, the sci-fi cinema, television and science education technology of today will create a new group of young enthusiasts.
People once huddled around their television in the late 1960s and early 1970s to catch live television broadcasts beamed from astronauts on the moon. Are we approaching a similar day when families will come together around their iPad or Smart TV to watch the first human put his or her footprint in the rosy dunes of Mars —coming in peace for all man kind? I think so.