As an American kid in the 1960s, I wanted to be an astronaut. Who didn’t? It was an age of heroes and wonder. I remember lying on the hood of my parent’s car, gazing at the Texas stars for hours. The night in 1969 that Neil Armstrong carried humanity to the moon, I took pictures of black-and-white history on our TV screen. In my thirties, I made the first cut in NASA’s Journalist-in-Space project.1 And I was at the Kennedy Space Center that January day in 1986, when the manned space program reached its sobering maturity with the loss of Challenger, her six astronauts and Teacher-in-Space Christa McAuliffe. Until that morning, no American had ever been killed in spaceflight.2 Over the next years, I covered the men and women of the space program as they grieved, recovered and returned Americans to orbit.
The Challenger tragedy ended the Journalist-in-Space competition and any pretense that the space shuttle was routine. There was nothing ordinary about the most advanced machine ever built. The shuttle was nearly the size of an airliner—its cargo bay as big as a boxcar. It could loft seven astronauts and it flew ten times faster than a rifle bullet.3 4 Astounding.
I spent several years covering the space program for CBS News. Usually television makes events look grander than they are. A shuttle launch was the only event in my experience that was diminished by TV. Our equipment automatically limited the peaks of sound and brightness. As I stood in the wetlands of the KSC, the shuttle’s main engines howled like a hurricane. The ignition of the twin solid rocket boosters set off a roar you felt in your bones more than your ears—crackling and popping as though the sky itself was fracturing. The flames from the boosters were brighter than the sun. After witnessing more than a dozen slow, majestic launches, I still marveled to myself, “There are people in there.”
CBS television news and the space program grew up together. In the 1950s and ’60s, Walter Cronkite brought the complexities of space down to earth and into our living rooms. Walter’s first reports from Cape Canaveral were broadcast from the back of a station wagon. As the manned space program grew, so did our presence at what became the Kennedy Space Center. CBS News built the “Don McGraw” building, a two-story studio with a panoramic view of Launch Complex 39. Don had been our chief engineer for CBS coverage of John Glenn’s orbital trip, Apollo 11’s landing on the moon and many other moments of history.5 The McGraw studio was three miles from the pads because engineers had calculated that three miles would be just beyond the range of flying debris from a hypothetical exploding Saturn V moon rocket.
In 2011, it became my sad duty to bring an end to the beginning of manned spaceflight at CBS News. On July 8, 2011, I had decided to anchor the CBS Evening News from the KSC studio. That day, the Atlantis orbiter was counting down to the last flight of the space shuttle program. The flight was known in NASA parlance as mission STS-135. It was the Space Transportation System’s 135th shuttle mission. Beginning with the first flight in 1981, there had been 133 successes and two heartbreaking failures.6 This last flight would leave America, for the first time in its history, with no successor vehicle waiting in the wings. For the foreseeable future, Americans would reach space only by paying a fortune for seats on Russian Soyuz capsules designed in the 1960s. I had become managing editor of the CBS Evening News only the month before. I had not imagined writing essays, but I was moved by this moment in history. At the end of the broadcast, I saluted America’s achievements in engineering and courage with these few words:
The shuttle had its critics. It was expensive. There were accidents. But there was nothing like it in the world and Americans conceived it. When tragedy struck, we pressed ahead without fear.
To a generation, man-in-space seemed as American as the constellation in our flag. But today marked the end of the heroic age of spaceflight when we all claimed ownership. The last shuttle left the Earth, drawing a bright, burning line in the sky—the signature of people who dare to dream.
After the broadcast, a black thunderstorm gathered over the fifty-two story Vehicle Assembly Building where shuttles and Apollo missions were made ready. The men and women who repaired and launched America’s spacecraft posed for final photos in front of the world’s largest American flag, two-hundred-nine feet tall, painted on the VAB in 1976 for the bicentennial celebration. Looking through the downpour toward the launch pad I wondered when in history had a nation abandoned the most advanced technology on Earth without advancing to the next step? How do we challenge young Americans to dare to dream? The next chapter offers an answer.