This post comes from Phoenix, Arizona. This morning I left the comfortable confines of home in Raleigh to attend an annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Funny, but conferences for public officials always seem to be held at swanky resorts. I won?t speculate as to the reason why.
Looking forward to the centennial of flight celebrations, I took off the bookshelf a copy of Thomas Wolfe?s 1979 book, The Right Stuff which chronicles America?s steps, and American heroes? steps, into space. Wolfe, to my mind among the foremost stars in American letters, also wrote a four part series on the astronauts in 1973 for the magazine Rolling Stone.
Three score years after the Wrights? momentous activity on the shores of the Outer Banks, a similar balance of risk-taking and humility, engineering prowess and innovative design, and grandiose dreaming married to hard-nosed, practical trial and error turned pilots into astronauts. Most of us know the adventure that preceded the December 17, 1903 launch of the Wright Flyer. You could do no better than to read Wolfe?s book-length treatment of the men, their machines, their dreams and the hold it took on the world?s imagination when the Wrights? airborne heirs escaped earth?s gravity entirely.
A brief excerpt describing U.S. Marine and future U.S. Senator John Glenn?s orbital flight to tempt your taste for the book and to show you why I marveled on my transcontinental flight this morning about the magnificence of the some-odd dozen feet the Wrights? covered 100 years ago.
This is Friendship 7,? he said. ?I?ll try to describe what I?m in here. I am in a big mass of some very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they?re luminescent. I never saw anything like it. They?re round, a little. They?re coming by the capsule, and they look like little stars. A whole shower of them going by. They swirl around the capsule and go in front of the window and they?re all brilliantly lighted. They probably average maybe seven or eight feet apart, but I can see them all down below me also?
?Roger, Friendship 7.? This was the capcom on Canton Island out in the Pacific. ?Can you hear any impact with the capsule? Over.?
?Negative, negative. They?re very slow. They?re not going away from me more than maybe three or four miles per hour.?
Perhaps another comment on flight, more on ALEC, the federalism debates that I expect tomorrow and Saturday, any insight I gain from the North Carolina delegation and my visit this afternoon to Arizona?s answer to the John Locke Foundation, The Goldwater Institute, will come in future posts.
