Sailing to the stars. Only slowly.

[desperance]

Just a quick 'bon voyage' to Discovery. My first real memory of any space programme is the moon landings, which just felt like an absolutely right and proper thing to be happening, and next stop Mars; and it seems like we've been going backwards ever since. Be nice to think that reversal had stopped, and we were starting to go forward again. Not that the shuttle has ever been a substitute for real rockets and real exploration beyond Earth orbit (me, I'm just a bug-eyed spaceboy at heart; my cousin is a big-shot astronomer - Roger Griffin, look him up - and when I was a kid he sent me a commemorative silver dollar from the States, struck with an eagle landing on the moon with an olive branch in its beak, which I still carry thirty-five years later), but at least it's better than nothing.