Today's launch was imperative, even with its great risks and many delays, to return to our rightful place in space exploration--human space exploration. America cannot and will not be relegated to a has-been. It is our time once more to go boldly into our last frontier. Discovery is the first step back in the right direction...to bigger achievements on par with the Apollo years. I want to witness this history before our eyes and savor it the rest of my days. We should be proud in our accomplishments but not haughty, for we can be made lowly in an instance as Apollo I, Challenger and now Columbia has shown proven so evidently clear.
NASA is a Phoenix rising, out of its own ashes and into a new world of continued exploration. As I wrote in an English paper (of the same name as this post) in my first year in college on President Bush's new space plan:
Eugene Cernan, the last man on the Moon, said as he left, “We leave as we came and, god willing, as we will return, with peace, and hope for all mankind” (Bush). Space exploration has beckoned us once again, as in the distant bygone era of the "Space Race." We are not call to go there now just to visit but instead to stay, as Cernan said, "with peace, and hope for all mankind" (Bush). Although President George W. Bush’s new space initiative may need some financial reworking along the way, the stage has been set, which is the most important step of all. As an American people, all we can do now is dream, as before, the impossible dream.Dreaming the impossible dream is what we as a nation need, for anything is possible if you only believe. That, my friend, is the first step. May God grant our astronauts safe passage back to Earth, back to their families, and back to their nation, returning home safe and sound.
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