May 232009
Once the weather improves, the space shuttle Atlantis will return to Earth after successfully completing its mission to repair the Hubble telescope. Let’s take a moment to marvel at the mind-boggling coolness of this accomplishment. A group of people blasted off on a rocket, orchestrated a carefully calculated ballet of physics to chase down an object moving at thousands of miles per hour, plucked it out of space with a robotic arm, gave it a tune-up while working in the vacuum of space, and then returned said object to its usual orbit. A million things could have gone wrong, but somehow, everything went as planned.
Humans can fuck up on a grand scale, but sometimes we don’t give ourselves enough credit.
