December 25, 2021

Published in the East Bay Sakonnet Times, Dec. 30, 2021

I awoke today to my alarm on this Christmas morning to watch the lift-off of the French and Canadian rocket carrying the American space telescope.

At 7:20am EST, the world's most powerful space telescope atop an Ariane 5 rocket took off from the European Spaceport facility near the equator in French Guiana before shooting over the Atlantic Ocean.

Oh, what a watch it was! The candle lit, the fire from its rockets, and the fifteen-story launch vehicle rose from the flames!

I loved hearing the countdown in French and seeing the shots of the mission crews and multinational dignitaries in the control "fishbowl.” So much worldwide collaboration coming together for "cinq, quatre, trois, deux, un, zero.”

After 27 minutes of near breath-holding, the world was rewarded with the detaching of the final rocket stage when, lo and behold, from its onboard camera we watched the James Webb telescope slip away, twinkling like fireflies against a blackness darker than dark. Then it came to life as the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore took over to now vigilantly guide the spacecraft to a point a million miles from Earth while calibrating its instruments and aligning its 18 hexagonal mirrors, which must all function in unison to send back pictures of what has never been seen before.

I always think about how many things must go right for a lift-off into space, how many wires and cables and plugs must hold their connections under untold gravitational forces. All placed in perfect order by fingers following diagrams formed by human brains. And computers, of course.

Magic. Pure magic.

Although today I didn't hear mention of a previous NASA flight at Christmastime, I remembered one 53 years ago. I again had set my alarm to watch it in Houston.

Our country roiled in turmoil with the loss of two proponents of peace—Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy—and the capture of a Navy intelligence ship, USS Pueblo, by North Korea. We watched on our little TV screens in black-and-white or color the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive, the riots in Washington, DC, and we applauded the landmark Civil Rights Act.

On Christmas Eve, 1968, as this tragic year in American history drew to a close, millions around the world were watching and listening as the Apollo 8 astronauts—Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders—became the first humans to orbit another world, the Moon. The astronauts read the first ten verses from Genesis and Anders snapped the iconic photograph "Earthrise," which would give us all a new view of our home planet.

So many innovative and positive events have transpired over this past half-century, but in many ways it seems that time has withdrawn within itself. Most of us have rearranged our holiday season due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and our large-screen TVs bring into our homes in living color national and worldwide unrest and pain.

Those realities aside, I felt a sense of relief and joy to witness a celebration of global ingenuity and cooperation, to watch a million twinkling fireflies combine into a vivid lightbulb shape as the telescope unfolded its solar arrays and floated in space above our Big Blue Marble.

Nancy Webb (no known relation to James)