Big Day

It has been a busy month with the preparation of my manuscript and dummy for the first trip to a publisher. There are no guarantees that anything will be published but as an extension of the conference I recently attended, Chronicle Editor Melissa Manlove promised to look over each of our manuscripts and make comments.

It is a little like getting an audience with the pope and having him say, "Hey, how about we go out for drinks?" (This is a humorous way of saying that it is hard! I don't even know if the pope is allowed to drink anything but sacramental wine. But I digress...)

Editors are some of the busiest people in the business. They are also inundated with submissions on a daily basis so any chance to avoid the slush pile is not to be missed. I plan on making a copy of the book available in PDF format to my blog's Three Readers as soon as I figure out a way to make the file manageable.

I'm looking for an appropriate way to celebrate this milestone beyond marking it done in my time management app.

Today also marks the last launch of the Space Shuttle Program. Atlantis launched at just before 11:30 this morning and unfortunately, I had to work. I did get to watch the launch while streaming on my iPod. Something I never would have dreamed of when I was a kid.

I remember getting up early that morning and, with my parent's permission, I turned on the TV before the sun came up in California. I don't remember if I got my sisters up or not. They generally weren't as excited about such things as I was. But I especially remember thinking about the exciting future when shuttles would launch every two weeks and space flight would be routine.

Obviously it didn't turn out that way but it was still fun to imagine. Because of the shuttles we have great technologies and understand out world better. And because of them we understand that space flight is not as routine as we were led to believe. I will always remember where I was when Challenger exploded and when Columbia broke up. Columbia especially since it was my birthday and it seemed that she tried so hard to keep her passengers save. Read the accident report and you'll understand.

Now that the program is ending I understand why but I still wish the magnificent vehicles were not obsolete. It's hard to watch something I loved, end but I think the future of spaceflight looks even more exciting.

We're not going to hang around in low earth orbit anymore. We're setting our sights on the asteroids and Mars. The shuttles were never designed for that and they have become too expensive to keep flying while trying to get to these new destinations.

So now I say farewell to the shuttles and thanks for the great ride!

Columbia
Challenger
Discovery
Atlantis
Endeavour