When I was in 7th grade (way back in the early 1990’s), my dad gave me my first computer. Of course, this was before the days of the World Wide Web being used as it is today, so there wasn’t much “mult-media” accessible on the computer (not that it could have handled much to begin with!). However, I did have a CD-ROM (be thankful those are mostly antiques now) of “Famous Speeches” that came with the computer.

I only remember watching one video on that disc, and it was this one. It changed my life and made me dream beyond my small hometown. I still cry every time Pres. Kennedy says “Why some say go to the Moon?…”

This is a video about dreaming, determination, freedom and humanity’s greatness.

As a result of this speech (and watching it countless times on my now-ancient computer collecting dust in my parent’s attic), I’m a science teacher.

Dream big.

The 125th Space Shuttle mission launches today, and it’s a big day for science!

NASA has a fantastic interactive webpage they’ve built for the mission so you can learn more about the mission’s goals (always good to have those!), the astronauts and the Hubble Space Telescope.

Thanks to the principles of acceleration, trajectory, projectiles, chemical reactions, gravity etc (we’ll be studying all of these in the coming year!), not only are we sending humans, a vehicle (the Space Shuttle is a vehicle, after all) and a great deal of heavy equipment into orbit around our planet, but this is the last mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Hubble Telescope is, by all accounts, the greatest science experiment of all time (we’ll be doing a few of those this year as well). So, it’s sad that this will be the last time that we’ll be visiting this marvel of human accomplishment, but we’ll certainly be receiving wonderful images from Hubble for years to come.

However, the Hubble has been in orbit for a long time and it’s provided us with an amazing amount of data and information that we could have never gotten from a telescope here on earth (we’ll talk about that this year, too!). How long has the Hubble been in orbit around earth? Believe it or not, the Hubble was launched aboard a space shuttle waaaayyy back when I was finishing my 7th grade year in 1990! That’s right. So, the telescope is old, but it has aged well!

We’ll be covering more about why telescopes work the way they do, why the Hubble is/was so important for science and some of the results from the data that we’ve received from the Hubble.

In the meantime, enjoy the Shuttle launch today at 2:01pm, which you can watch live on NASA TV!