Last Shuttle brings joy, sadness and hope
Linda Wiggins | Aug 1, 2011, 2:23 p.m.
Brevard County, Fla. — Viera, Suntree and Rockledge have become a favored home community for workers at Kennedy Space Center, migrating to the mainland from the Satellite Beach bedroom community of the Apollo program era. Civil and military employees of Patrick Air Force Base, which plays a key role in space, also make their homes here in large numbers.
Space shuttle Atlantis launched July 8 on the final flight of the shuttle program, STS-135, transporting Commander Chris Ferguson, Pilot Doug Hurley, and mission specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim on a 12-day mission to the International Space Station. Atlantis will eventually make its way back to Brevard for display at KSC, capping off a succession of launches dating to 1981. “The launch was beautiful and exciting as always. But this time it was also sad,” said Carol DeMaggio of Viera.
“You wonder how much of what makes this a special place to live was wrapped up in the shuttle program and what the future will look like without it.”
Eau Gallie High School 11th grader Erika Yesowitch was not even born when the first shuttle, Columbia, launched. It had already flown for 14 years by the time she came along. She said she does not know what life is like without it. To see a launch, she merely walks out her front door and looks to the northeast, but not this last time. “We wanted to do something special, with this being the last one,” she said, while waiting for the launch with her family and friends. A student of the Cambridge magnet program, Yesowitch may find herself a candidate one day for the future of space on the Space Coast. “It’s scary, but with all of the exciting things that have come out of the space program – inventions, solutions to problems, products, advancements in science – there is every reason to believe the best is yet to come,” Yesowitch said.
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