Via some service on Twitter I get a message any time the International Space Station is likely to appear overhead. It has been doing so frequently of late and I got around to going out to see it on Friday night (but missed it) and last night and tonight.
It’s quite something special to see this little light flying quietly through the sky. For the last 10 years of my life I’ve lived close to the flightpaths in Dublin Airport so flashing lights through the sky are generally accompaned with some aircraft noise. This is quite different. It’s quite a weird feeling to think that we – collectively – put that thing up there.
The first time I saw it was the night that the Space Shuttle launched last year. I was outside watching that too. At the time, it was unusual enough for us to see the shuttle over Irish skies but its trajectory took it over Ireland during two launches last year. I thought it was amazing to watch, this thing which had taken off from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida something like 17 minutes earlier and now, here it was over the skies in Ireland. We can do stuff right enough, humanity.
When I was a kid, and we had relatives coming from America, I used to go to Shannon with my dad to collect them. So I used to see aeroplanes quite a lot, although I didn’t then live anywhere near a flight path (aeroplanes were a huge novelty when I was school because no one ever really saw them). Now of course, I see them all the time because I live not too far from Dublin Airport and I see them on my way to work and on my way home and when I go shopping and when I go to IKEa and when I go to the beach. I used to live in a 20 storey building in London under the Heathrow landing path. It’s quite something to look over the lights of a city like London and see the lights of aircraft lining up to land in Heathrow out your bedroom window. I like flying things to some extent.
Mostly I like the feeling of looking at something with a little feeling of wonder.
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I haven’t seen the ISS but I remember as a kid my dad explaining space travel to me. This was the era of the Sputniks. I remember being very upset when it dawned on me that Laika the dog…was not coming back..!
I also remember Telstar and the first transatlantic tv transmission – a very snowy image on a very small monitor!
We all take technology for granted but I wonder how it will advance over the next 20 years.
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