My birthday and the space shuttle.

I know that everyone and their little sister is writing about the space shuttle today, but it's my birthday and I'll be cliche if I want to. Besides, it's an important thing to me, and since it launched today on my birthday it only seems fitting to give it the only real sendoff I can.

Today I turn 32. I was 2 when the shuttle first launched into orbit on April 12, 1981. I feel like the shuttle has been a big part of my youth since the very beginning.

I was always a nerdy kid. Well, I still am a nerdy kid. When I was little though there was no greater thing to aspire to than to be an astronaut. That aspiration hasn't really even gone away. Deep down inside me there's something that says that some day maybe I'll go into orbit. Right next to it of course is the part that says I'm already to old, too fat, and that I hate flying anyhow.

I was obsessed with flying and spaceflight as a child. One of my earliest memories of a vacation was a trip to my uncle's house in Virginia. I flew for the first time, which was then a highlight (and now is an irritation). I went to the National Air and Space Museum for the firs time, still my favorite place to go in Washington DC. I had an uncle who was a helicopter pilot for the Army, and I pestered him endlessly to give me as much stuff related to flying as I could get. My room at home was filled with books about flying. I wanted more than anything to go to Florida and watch a launch, but I never got to go.

Not all of the memories are pleasant, of course. I am, in fact, old enough to remember watching the Challenger disaster live. I am a resident (and was then) of New Hampshire, and the fact that a teacher from my state was being launched into orbit was enough to guarantee that we watched the takeoff from the private school I attended at the time.

I didn't really understand what was going on, of course. I was 6 years old at the time, and in first grade. The idea that human beings had just been vaporized by a failure in the fuel system wasn't something I was really equipped to understand. All I knew was that something was very very wrong.

I won't claim it was a trauma. I still loved space when it happened and I continue to love space. It was the first time however that I understood that something as awesome as the space program could fail.

The second shuttle disaster I remember much more clearly. I was in my early 20s at the time, and living in San Diego. I had head about a problem on the news that morning before I left for work. I remember thinking to myself that I hoped everything would turn out OK.

I found out on the bus on the way to work that it hadn't. I was checking the news on my mobile phone at the time when I read the news of the Columbia's disintegration. It took a while for the news to sink in.

Maybe that was when the understanding of how dangerous space travel is set in, and I just didn't realize. Maybe it was before that. Maybe I still don't really understand the true dangers of operating above the earth's atmosphere. Now a part of me still wants to reach for the stars, and another part of me wants to grow roots into the earth.