I found this the other day while doing some surfing and I thought I would share. I may get in trouble for re-posting this, but I’ll be glad to take it down if they mind. It’s from his toastmaster speech at the 61st World Science Fiction Convention and can be found here in its entirety http://www.spiderrobinson.com/torspeech.html if you want to read the whole thing.
While the whole speech in itself is great, the part I really enjoyed was when he was talking about attending an actual shuttle launch. Being a space advocate as well, I wanted to share my find for your enjoyment. Here is the the part I am talking about :
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“I’d like to tell you a story now merely because it’s one of my favorite stories, and because it happened only days after the last time I was a Worldcon toastmaster…and because it may provide a hint as to just what went wrong with the space program. It was during the first Bush administration. I’d had the great good fortune to be given a VIP pass to attend a space shuttle launch. When the big day dawned, my friends and wife and I passed thousands of stopped cars on the shoulder, cleared the checkpoint, drove over the causeway and joined the elite line of perhaps a hundred cars full of citizens privileged to watch the launch a mere mile or so away from the pad. We were somewhat dismayed when the line stopped altogether. And STAYED stopped.
The sun beat down. Air-conditioners overheated their engines. People stepped out into murderous heat to ask each other the obvious question, to which no answer was forthcoming. Fifteen minutes passed, very slowly. Up the road in the opposite direction came a motorcycle cop with a bullhorn; he drove past us very slowly, ignoring all pleas and gestures, braying, “REMAIN IN YOUR VEHICLES” over and over. Our vehicles were by now solar ovens. A million years went by…mosquitoes gorged…sunblock ran down our necks…children cried…tempers began to climb…the damn launch was only 15 min away, now–and suddenly, all became clear.
Coming toward us on the opposite side of the road at twenty kilometers an hour, shimmering in the heat, a vision: a flotilla of black stretch limousines. Surrounded by a phalanx of motorcycle cops. Chase-cars full of shooters in suits and black shades fore and aft. The truth began to dawn. Sure enough, as the second limo came even with us, five meters away, its tinted rear windows powered down, and there they were. Identical robotic waves &ghastly smiles, like terrible twin parodies of the Queen. Dan and Marilyn Quayle.
Mr. Quayle’s duties as Vice President had included direct responsibility for America’s space program. Three months away from leaving office, now, he had decided to pay his first visit ever to NASA turf, while they still had to let him in. We all realized we’d been kept broiling in the sun so the Secret Service could make absolutely sure there wasn’t an alligator with an Uzi in one of the drainage ditches beside the road.
And as the motorcade crawled past, and Mr. Quayle waved and smiled–I swear to you–all of us gave him what here in Canada is called the Trudeau Salute.
The motorcade passed, traffic started up, and we were in time to see the ENDEAVOUR lift, the 50th shuttle launch ever–there’s that magic number fifty again. If anyone had told me, back in the 1950s when I started reading science fiction, that one day I would see a spaceship take off with my own eyes…well, I’d have found it hard to imagine. But if they’d told me that on the same day I would see hundreds of Americans loyal enough to have VIP access to government property all publicly give the Vice President of the United States the finger, I’d have flatly refused to believe it.
I like to think we’ve all come a long way.
I will close, shamelessly, by quoting myself: with an excerpt from a book I published a few years ago called CALLAHAN’S KEY, because it describes what I saw after Dan Quayle drove away:
At first the world is nothing but horizon, endless ocean and sky, all of it still, serene. Three hundred and sixty degree Spielberg. The stillness is not perfect-there is the countdown bellowing out of those superb speaker horns, and there is the internal thunder of elevated pulse-but basically the world is as it has always been: at rest, indifferent to anything any of the scurrying ants on its surface might come up with.
Then Hell breaks loose.
A dirty white explosion spreads in all directions. At its center, beneath the stacked array, a Beast is born. It is mighty. And angry. Its roar shatters the world, splits the sky, echoes up and down the Florida coast and miles out to sea. You thought you knew what to expect, but this is louder. The sound is tangible, hits you with physical force, vibrates up your legs from the ground beneath your feet, scares the living shit out of you. Your first thought is that you are witnessing a disaster even more awful than Challenger: an on-the-pad explosion.
Then the Beast’s two big brothers wake up-the giant solid rocket boosters-and Heaven, Hell, Purgatory and Limbo all break loose together and start to argue. The sound is indescribable, just short of unbearable. So insensate is the rage of this new Beast that the world itself will not have it. No matter that something the size and weight of an apartment building is sitting on its back: it lifts from the ground on a raving column of its own fury and rises impossibly into the air, becomes a thick growing tower of white smoke, the 128-ton Shuttle stack balanced on top like a pingpong ball on the stream from a firehose. The bonds of Earth can be as surly as they like: the Beast is surlier, shrugs its terrible shoulders and slips them clean.
You realize that you are pounding your hands together and screaming “Go, baby, go!” like an idiot at the top of your lungs, and you gather that everyone around you is doing the same, but you can’t hear any of it. Part of you wishes you had control of your hands so that you could take photos like you planned to, and another part is amused at the audacity of the notion that this event could possibly be squeezed through a pinhole and captured on a piece of celluloid smaller than a matchbook. Instead you watch in reverent terror as a utensil built by bald apes flings 97 tons of metal and plastic 2 million mi. With 5 men aboard.
For two million years it had been only a fantasy, a monkey dream. For the first fifteen years of my own life it had still been only a fantasy, something a teacher or a scientist might laugh at you for believing in. For the next quarter-century it had been a news story-one that seemed to bore most of my fellow citizens silly. But now it was reality-real reality; that is, the part experienced by me-and the two-million-year-old dream had really come true:
The species I belonged to had figured out how to climb the biggest tree there is. We were already becoming familiar with its lowest branches.
In that moment, I knew, as fact, with utter certainty, that one day we were going to climb all the way to the top. Nothing was going to prevent us. Not presidents, proxmires, press, public opinion, economic forces, or nuclear winter.
No, it could be delayed, but it could not be stopped. This was evolution in action, before my eyes. As surely as we had come down out of the trees, as surely as we had crawled up out of the tidal pools in the first place, we were going to do this thing.
To put it in Canadian: Let’s do it, eh?”
jw-johnson.com