IN SPACE

It's easy to forget that our home planet is actually among the stars.

Space Shuttle  launches are always bittersweet events for me.  Like many other science-inclined American boys,  I always wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up, and like so many others, that didn't happen.  Instead, I grew up, earned a science degree in college, and went into teaching and writing.  I got married and had two children, and the truth is that whatever childhood fancies may be,  I would not trade these good things for a single trip to orbit.

Yet the desire is still there, every time I watch a launch and keep daily track of the activities of the shuttle and the International  Space Station astronauts as they carry out remarkable feats of engineering, science, and courage hundreds of miles above my head.  Fortunately, my interest in amateur astronomy serves as a substitute for launching into the stars myself, and setting up my telescope on dark nights gives me a personal window to the environment the astronauts explore.

Like everyone else who has lived in the late 20th century, I heard the rhetoric about "spaceship Earth" without giving it much thought.  Late one night, however, while doing some stargazing-I think I was meteor watching-the meaning of the phrase hit me.  I lay back  back in a lawn chair, looking up at the sky above.  With the surrounding trees  disappearing at the edge of my vision, and my sense of gravity suspended as I lay in the cool night air,  an illusion suddenly presented itself to me: I was no longer laying back, looking up at the stars, but rather pressed flat against a vertical surface, looking forward and out into the abyss of space.

"Of all the strange things man has forgotten," wrote my favorite author,  G.k. Chesterton, "the strangest and most tragic lapse of memory is that by which he has forgotten that he is living on a star."  That night I remembered what Chesterton said, and realized that we had forgotten  that Earth is actually itself a part of space, an exotic "star" whirling about a fantastic corner of the cosmos.  When I'm observing I always try, and sometimes succeed, to capture that feeling again, and to perceive us as we really are: not bound to the ground with the heavens far above, but clung exhilaratingly to a spinning ball wheeling through space.

This is part of the romance of space travel: to "slip the surly bonds of Earth," as the poet and aviator
John Gillespie Magee, Jr., wrote, to be able to look out and see the stars go by-to be in space.  Yet we often forget that the very ground we think of as solid beneath our feet is actually a chunk of rock hurtling through the galaxy.  As individuals we do not need to launch ourselves into orbit aboard  massive rockets in order to travel to space.  All we need to do is to look out into space that surrounds
us each night.  Those who risk their lives by traveling to the stars do mankind a noble service, and it's only natural to admire their privilege.  Yet,  in the end, there's no real need for me to go "out there" to the stars; I'm  already here among them.   -- from  SKY & TELESCOPE  Oct. 2010