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EDITOR'S
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I was 6
years old when the Eagle landed on the moon. Back
then my mission in life was to drink Tang. I
begged my mom to buy some, but she said it cost
too much. "Why in the world," she
asked, "would you want to drink Tang when
you have fresh oranges growing in your own back
yard?" But in 1969, my thirst for Tang had nothing to do with this world. Tang was what the astronauts drank on the way to the moon. And the taste, according to all the TV commercials, was "out of this world." |
| When I finally did get my first taste of Tang, I was terribly disappointed. I despised the stuff. It was a lesson in hype that was hard to swallow. Within a few months, much of the glamour was gone from the space program. Moonshots were old news, and taxpayers didn't want to spend the money to put people on Mars. Skylab and interplanetary probes didn't generate much excitement, and the space shuttle explosion was dreadful. |
By then I was working for Virginia Business, and I was beginning to understand the economics and politics of the space program. We won the Cold War, and Star Wars fizzled out. Congress even ditched the space plane -- my only hope of ever orbiting Earth.
Then John Glenn stepped back into the picture. This guy traveled in space before I was born, and he obviously relished the idea of going back up. So when someone suggested that Virginia Business do a story on the Old Dominion's emerging space industry, I got all excited. "What we need for the cover," I enthused, "is one of those curvature of the Earth pictures taken from the space shuttle."
I called the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, and the public relations people there invited me down to poke through their files. They had plenty of space shuttle shots, but none of them was quite right. Public affairs assistant Kimberly Land found a similar photograph on the NASA web site, but we weren't able to download it to her printer. So she picked up the phone and called the Johnson Space Center in Texas.
"Houston," she said, "we have a problem."
OK, those may not have been her exact words, but you get the idea.
The guys on the ground in Houston came up with the perfect picture to illustrate Sally Kirby Hartman's story about Virginia's emerging space industry.
NASA and its predecessor have been active in Virginia since 1917, but many of Virginia's commercial space efforts are just now getting off the ground. High among them is the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority's attempt to turn Wallops Island into a major rocket-launching facility. NASA already blasts satellites into orbit from Wallops Island, and Virginia officials say the facility has plenty of untapped potential to do the same thing for the private sector.
Perhaps Wallops Island will be the commercial catalyst that transforms Virginia's emerging space industry into a major economic force that will propel the Old Dominion to the frontiers of telecommunications technology in the next millennium.
Sounds great, but does it pass the Tang test?
Maybe so, maybe no. But we'll never know if we don't try. That's the point of the space program: Mankind advances only when people try new things -- even nasty stuff like Tang.
Karl
Rhodes
Executive Editor
© JANUARY 1999, VIRGINIA BUSINESS
MAGAZINE