Last week I went to an astronaut's speech on the future of commercial space flight. The astronaut, Steve Smith, worked on the Hubble Space Telescope while it was in orbit. I got to meet and talk with him personally for a few minutes, and loved every second of it.
He had a lot of interesting anecdotes, but the one that I'm still thinking about is this: the space program rejected him as an astronaut candidate four times before being accepting him. You can only apply once every two years, so he was living in a state of space-program rejection for eight years before being accepted. I wish I had had the foresight to ask him whether this was normal for astronaut candidates, or if he was an exception. Either way, the fact that he keep reaching for his dream, even after eight years of rejection, is amazing and inspiring to me.
2 comments:
Wow. :)
If one is 24 years of age then an 8 year rejection can seem like a third of your life being rejected. If one is say, 50 years old then the rejection time can seem more managable.
A more to home example: Seven years in college seems like you're there forever, all your life. After a 40 year career the college time seems short and most of it is hard to remember.
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