Story

The Way of the Water

by Anne Lenehan

Excerpt

Story’s first space flight, in April 1983, was also the Space Shuttle Challenger’s maiden voyage. The second of the spaceships in the fleet, Challenger had been named after the British Naval vessel HMS Challenger which ventured through the Atlantic and Pacific oceans during the 1870's on a journey of scientific discovery.

When the new orbiter emerged from the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center on 30 November 1982, Story shared the historic moment by riding along the six kilometer path to Launch Pad 39A with his spaceship. For him, it was an essential part of the immersion in space flight: the spirit of preparation, the excitement of those who had participated in the development and construction of the Space Shuttles over a fourteen year period – Story was a part of all that. But above all else, it was the ongoing drama of space exploration through which, in Story’s own words, we “reach out and touch our universe”. In that context, he wrote:

Man is the bridge for life moving off earth, for life to crawl into the cosmos.

Story captured the experience by jumping on and off the slow moving crawler-transporter, taking photographs of everything – the incredible machinery as well as the overall scene of activity. The prospect of finding himself in a brand new physical and psychological environment was exhilarating.

In the midst of the high-tech hardware of the space program, Story was reliving his childhood experiences on the farm: lying in the coolness of freshly ploughed fields and wading in dark pond water. Blazing rockets would soon parallel his earliest memories of horse-power, but neither grass, nor trees, nor solid ground would exist in the new world to which he had earned the right after sixteen years of patient dedication to the space program. What Story took with him, though – a legacy from his childhood – was a Romantic view of space. He wrote:

We are explorers forever moving outwards, or we die inwards.