Thinking Big

I was just captivated by the story in the news about NASA’s Stardust space capsule that returned to earth on Sunday after a 7-year, 3 billion mile trip to collect interstellar dust and comet samples. Imagine what it would take just to envision such a mission – and then to work out all the details, build and launch the thing and then sit around and wait for 7 years for it to come back. Now, of course, there are years of scientific investigation just getting started as NASA reviews the ‘harvest’ that was collected. What a project! Talk about 'Thinking Big!'

And all for Space Dust. The debris of the millennia.

Who could have thought, in the first place, that collecting it would help us understand our origins? What sorts of minds developed the mathematics and the physics and the propulsion? The optics and the engineering and the processes and the materials? Who could have put all the details together to make this happen? Somebody managed to get it up there in the first place… and then somebody got it safely down again! Intact!! Who thought of all the potential problems and then solved them? Who had the faith to push it through, and who had the guts to try?

Amazing, that such minds can develop; that people can think THAT big.