Final shuttle launch: ‘End of a chapter’ By LORETTA SWORD
lorettas@chieftain.com The Pueblo Chieftain
The space shuttle Atlantis lifts off last week from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.
COURTESY PHOTO/TODD SEIP
Todd SeipSkyview Middle School science teacher Todd Seip smiles moments after the spacecraft's launch. Exhaust plumes linger in the sky behind him.
He tried to watch the nation's final shuttle launch through his students' eyes, but Todd Seip's heart had its own agenda through some of it.
"There were people high-fiving and screaming all around, and there were others, like me, who were in tears over it all," said the Skyview Middle School science teacher, who's also a lifelong, unabashed fan of all things related to space.
"I don't know what it is about those moments that bring those feelings out, but that was one of them," Seip said Monday, two days after returning from Kennedy Space Center and still at a loss for words to adequately describe the experience.
Seip was one of 150 Twitter followers who won a NASA lottery that brought them all together for a whirlwind tour of the space center that included interviews with astronauts and engineers (and reporters from CNN and other national media outlets) and culminated with VIP seats to the nation's final shot into space.
Their only obligation was the promise to Tweet about their trip to thousands of NASA Twitter fans worldwide. Seip's own followers (aside from his wife and 7-year-old twins at home) included 20 students who signed on for minute-by-minute updates.
His whole class this year, and for many to come no doubt, will share the experience via photos, video and a blog spot that Pueblo County School District 70 has agreed to host on its website.
As awestruck as he was by the shuttle launch itself, Seip said it wasn't necessarily the highlight of his trip.
As he walked through the gigantic building where shuttles are assembled, disassembled and repaired, he said he was humbled not just by its sheer size, but by the thought of "all the man- and woman-hours that were spent in that building, working on incredible machines that won't be used anymore. I just realized how dedicated all those people really are to that mission, and wondered how the whole thing felt for them."
The mood around the space center was quietly expectant.
Seip said he saw and felt "a mood of deep introspection. A lot of those people knew they would be getting pink slips this week. The volunteers knew times will be changing for them."
Several former and current astronauts expressed similar sentiments during interviews with Seip and some of the other NASA TweetUp winners, he said.
"Some of them will get to go back up with the Russians, but none of them in an American spacecraft, at least not a NASA craft. For the first time in our space program, there's no new space vehicle on the boards, nothing new to look forward to. We've always dominated, but now, somebody else will," Seip said.
He predicted that the government's withdrawal from space is temporary, though, and doesn't mean the end of American space travel.
Whether the next foray into the universe from American soil is undertaken by NASA or a pioneering private enterprise, no doubt Seip will be watching — as he has since watching the first brave space explorers skyrocket into the skies in tiny Gemini "capsules." Seip saw one of the Geminis at the space center and was astounded to realize that "they aren't much bigger than the bathroom in an airplane."
Seip said he hopes that by sharing his recent experience with students — many of whom had never heard of the shuttle program, and no doubt those in the future will have forgotten about it — other minds and hearts will be sparked to imagine, to study and to dream. Who knows? Maybe one of Seip's students will be the next American on the moon — or on Mars.
As far as he's concerned, the final shuttle launch is just a pause in a long history of American ingenuity, determination, courage and hope.
"This might be the end of a chapter, but there's another chapter, and maybe more than one. They just haven't been written yet," Seip said.
Anyone who's interested can share Seip's adventure at: skyviewscience.blogspot.com.
