Tonight we made the kids watch this movie that we’ve been talking about forever…and believe me, it was predictable. Totally predictable. To us that is…and every other person who has been taught about the NASA program and Apollo 13.
A child of the moon race, I apparently watched the Apollo 11 landing. It was the miracle that the people of the sixties had waited for since the Russians started their cosmonaut program and President Kennedy said that we would go to the moon by the end of the decade.
It was a bold statement and one that caused both excitement and instilled fear in Americans across the country…none more so than Jim Lovell’s wife, Marilyn.
This whole program was a wing and a prayer by some standards and yet was designed to within standard tolerances not used in most industries even today. What wasn’t designed, nor could ever be, was the passion and the dream that made it possible.
For every man and woman since then who knows what happened, and has happened since, with Challenger and the Columbia – still, they want to try for Mars.
Who could blame them?
Every time I see this movie, I see something I’ve not seen before. Tonight, the love story told from both perspectives of Jim and Marilyn makes me 100% certain that I could never be left behind. If we are going to Mars, I would go, too. Of course, I’d want to bring the kids, too, but I am not certain they’d want to go. It was predictable tonight that one of the kids did not want to watch this movie…chances are one of them would not want to go with us. Maybe we’ll have to cross that bridge and maybe we won’t. Only time will tell, but hopefully we know more by then so that there are as few unknowns as possible.
~ Dawn aka Hat Girl