I’ve always had a special connection with the Space Shuttle. She’s been a source of inspiration and motivation in my life since my childhood, and by chance, our paths crossed again just yesterday. Here’s our story.

As is the case for many kids, I found space stuff pretty cool when I was about five years old. But I was born in the seventies, and not much was happening for the first few years of my life; I heard about the Moonwalkers, but I had essentially missed out on the mighty Apollo era. Space was not my only interest though — I also loved planes. There was a small airfield close to our house where I would spend happy days watching small planes and gliders take off and land. Maybe not surprisingly then, I was very much looking forward to the era of the Space Shuttle — after all, it would be pretty much like a space plane!

On April 12, 1981, launch day was finally there. We were having our Easter school break, and I was glued to the TV for the entire time of the mission. The first launch of the Columbia was awesome, and even the first landing of this aerodynamic brick at Edwards Air Force base was spectacular to me. It was certainly the most beautiful spacecraft ever built. I told myself (and anybody willing to listen) that one day, I would be there, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, for the launch. Hopefully at the controls.

There’s plenty of examples of how big an influence the shuttle was in my life. Drawing classes for instance were a nightmare to me. I couldn’t put anything on paper that even remotely looked like what I had in mind, and moreover I had a tendency to knock paint or ink over my finished work at the last minute. One of the very few times though that I got a very good mark was when I had made a drawing of the shuttle launch. I guess that somehow I spent more time at it, and wanted the drawing to be the pretty sight that I thought the space shuttle is.

Also my first ever computer program was shuttle related. At age ten or so, I joined the local amateur astronomy club called Sirius and found a small home computer (yes, these were the eighties!) in the corner. My first program: a drawing of the shuttle. It were really the older guys that wrote the program, and I guess in a Sheldon type of way quite fascinating: they were just talking to me in coordinates. As an amateur astronomer, I’ve of course also seen many shuttle flybys, including a few double flybys shuttle/Mir and shuttle/ISS. But as a kid living in Europe, the chances of seeing a shuttle up close and personal seemed very remote.