| | Jeff,
When I was in preschool and kindergarten my father worked in a small bank in Titusville, Florida, right on the water downtown. When there was a launch (this was in the early phases of Apollo, before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon) the bankers and their families would gather in the employee cafeteria on the top floor. It had a big picture window looking out across the Indian River towards Cape Canaveral. The view was terrific, and the launch pads were close enough for the roar to fill the air.
My memories of those space shots are by far the earliest memories I have of any historical event. At the time we thought they represented the dawn of a new era. My father had founded the bank on that site precisely to take advantage of the business opportunities to be afforded by the opening of a new frontier. I immediately wanted be an astronaut, and was much too young to recognize the contradiction inherent in government funding of space exploration, or to have the slightest premonition of how fleeting the "Space Age" would prove to be.
In grade school and high school I read stories that had been penned by Robert Heinlein thirty years earlier in which he described a first era of space travel (space travel being a subject normally confined to the pages of pulp science fiction magazines at the time of his writing) as a "False Dawn," to be followed by a hiatus of decades before man moved decisively into the heavens. At first I did not guess even then that I was witnessing a case of life imitating art. But my dreams from boyhood have never left me, and one way or another they have influenced everything I have done and believed since.
I could not make it to Mojave this year, and therefore want to thank you for bringing me a little bit of the excitement generated by what we all hope will prove to be the dawn of the true Space Age.
-Bill
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