o i i I
The Eighties
roil
Me 111 a o Js Tke Twentkietk Century (IX)
But a mere two weeks after the
assassination attempt our attention
was turned to an exciting and suc-
cesful launch of the space shuttle
Columbia, the first spacecraft that could
be used again and again.
The f inal frontier
It took off from its launching pad at
Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and
after having orbited the earth 36 times it
landed in California at Edwards Air
Force Base. Everything had gone
smoothly and the two astronauts on
board, John W. Young and Robert L.
Crippen, had landed the spacecraft as
they would have landed an ordinary air
craft.
In the future the shuttle was to be used
to launch satelites into space, to carry
materials to build space stations and to
retrieve wayward space vehicles. It did
just that when it retrieved the
Indonesian Palapa B satellite, grabbing it
with its robot arm.
The first American woman in space was
Sally K. Ride who flew in the shuttle
Challenger. By that time we were getting
used to things going so well with the
space program and we were getting a bit
blasé. Then on January 28, 1986, the
Challenger exploded in the sky 74
seconds after lift-off. Its fiery pieces
came hurtling down and we watched its
spectacular demise with horror and
unbelief on T.V.
Seven lives were lost and again the
nation was stunned. It took quite a while
for the next space shuttle to be laun
ched, but the accident did not stand in
the way of subsequent succesful laun
ches.
On November 4, 1QSO Kon a Id Reagan was elected President of
the United States. During the eight years of his presidency quite a
few memorable events occured not the least of which was an
attempt to assassinate him. He was seriously wounded but, fortuna
tely, not hilled. The nation was shocked.
E. E plione liome
Man's quest to conquer new frontiers
does not stop at planet Earth. We have
been - and we are still - looking for intel
ligent life 'out there'. We can't believe
that we are alone, we can't believe that
we might be the only living beings in the
vast world of space, and therefore we
send space probes to other planets, pro
bes equipped with cameras, with scoop-
es to sample the soil, we send an
unmanned Mars lander, we walk on the
moon, we search the heavens with
powerful telescopes and radio dishes
that encicle the whole globe and we send
signals into the unknown.
We have never received an answer yet,
never found any evidence of life on
another planet yet, but that doesn't
mean tire is nothing out there. We just
refuse to be alone, it seems.
The whole idea of possible intelligent life
on other planets has intrigued man for a
long time. We know the evil Emperor
Ming of Flash Gordon fame, of course,
and we have been to the Planet of the
Apes, but sometime in 1982 we met
E.T., although not on his planet, but
brought to us by Steven Spielberg in a
wonderful movie that told us the story
of a friendship between a little boy and
an Extra-Terrestrial.
In that movie it were mostly die children
who understood E.T. and who helped
him catch his spaceship back to his own
planet, while the grown-ups wildly cha
sed the poor creature so they might exa
mine him. Perhaps it is the innocence of
childhood and the child in all of us, that
will find E.T.'s out there some day.
Ee rsonal computers
Meanwhile, with both our feet on terra
firma we were discove ring and building
computers. The very first computer
(calculator, really) is two thousand years
old and is said to be the abacus, familiar
to us when, still in the Indies, we obser
ved how this instrument is used.
I can remember watching the Chinese
storekeeper whose fingers flew over the
abacus' wooden frame, which consisted
of beads on rods divided in ten rows of
two beads each on the top row (repre
senting fives), and five beads each on
the bottom ten rows (representing sing
les). It can count into the billions! I
never mastered the use of it, but gro
wing up I never ceased to admire fire
user of this wonder.
I also remember when years ago
Remington Rand in Amsterdam had
computers as big as a room and that
these monsters were fed cards with holes
in them of different sizes; punch cards.
44 ste jaargang - nummer 9 - maart 2000
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