13 Minutes…

13 Minutes… In 2018, I fulfilled a lifelong dream. On a family holiday to Florida and Maryland, we spent a day at the Kennedy Space Center. I stood underneath a Saturn V, saw the Space Shuttle Atlantis and got to see artefacts from the history of American space exploration. These were the very same things that I’d read about as a child and dreamed of seeing for almost forty years. I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, when space travel still seemed to be part of the future. I wasn’t a space geek, but the books in the school library certainly left an impression. Apollo missions, enormous rockets, astronauts walking on the Moon and visions of people living on space stations – or even on the Moon itself. The year 2000 was the future then, and it was all incredibly exciting. Then came the Space Shuttle. For my generation, the Shuttle was the spacecraft. It looked more like an aeroplane than a rocket and seemed to promise that travelling into space might one day become almost routine. Of course,…