Last Shuttle flight

I am in denial. I am a child of the space age. I remember watching on tv, live the launches of multiple Apollo missions and probably some earlier ones too. I remember getting up in the middle of the night (to my mind) in 1969 to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. I remember them landing hours earlier... and that may have been the middle of the night... not the walk. We lived on the left coast side of the country at the time. Some of my earliest memories are of my father pulling us out of bed and out into the night air to watch the persieds and the Leonid meteor showers. I know I have spelled some of these wrong. I am listening as I write to the live countdown for Atlantis.

My heart aches. I know this seems strange... but we cheered and supported space research.
We were in college when the shuttle first launched and landed. In fact, my college linguistics professor Bill Little came in in the middle of our Linguistics final to tell us that YES, the first shuttle had landed safely on that May afternoon.

I as a parent pulled my small children out to watch the shuttle and the space station glide swiftly by above us in the night sky.... To see Mars as a large light, to look at the rings of Saturn,
See the comet in 1999-2000 in Finland.
To see the moon close and rising.


I saw Challenger's last landing...
my darling worked on the first shuttle imaging radar....
and here we watch Atlantis take off t minus 1 minute....
more later.....