Friends, neighbors gather to witness history
Crowd of about 20 breathes collective sigh of relief with success of launch
The moment a small plush dinosaur floated out of Bob Behnken’s hands, his 6-year-old son, Theo, knew the astronaut had made it.
The image of the toy delicately drifting into microgravity signaled to the boy that the SpaceX Falcon 9 capsule manned by Behnken and another astronaut had safely fallen into orbit.
A crowd of around 20 people gathered Saturday afternoon on a patio in the Timber Cove subdivision southeast of Houston, home to Behnken and many other past astronauts. The neighbors and friends of the astronaut waited anxiously for about eight minutes from the start of the launch until they saw the dinosaur and Behnken’s smiling face on live television.
“It means everything’s good,” said Jonathon Emmons, a neighbor of Behnken’s. “My kids will understand Bob’s good, their friend is good and everything is OK.”
Tears streamed down the face of Lynn Wicks, who has lived in the subdivision for 40 years. It wasn’t the first time she watched a neighbor launch into space.
“I was really good friends with Mike Smith, who was killed in the Challenger,” she said, wiping away tears. “I was taking care of their house when it exploded.”
The Challenger exploded 73 seconds after its launch. After she watched the first five minutes of flight on Saturday, Wicks said she could finally breathe. But she’s still not completely at ease.
“I’ll feel relieved when Bob’s feet are back on the ground,” she said.
Pete Hasbrook, who works for NASA and lives down the street from Behnken, said the research that will be done at the International Space Station on this mission will benefit humanity.
“It’s really important for us to be able to continue the work of the space station, the international partnership, the research we do in space,” he said.
Hasbrook’s wife, Annette, who works on NASA’s ORION program, said continuing to push ahead into space is still essential, even during a pandemic.
“They say it’s our destiny to explore,” she said. “It’s also, I think, our destiny to evolve. If we don’t continue to push those boundaries, we will fail as a nation and as a world.”