Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds…
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
– John Magee, RCAF pilot and poet.
Died in high flight, 11 December 1941.
Anousheh Ansari, the world’s fourth “space tourist”, and the first woman to pay her way into space lifted off Monday, heading for the International Space Station and fulfilling a life-long dream.
Anousheh Ansari, AFP via CNN.
As a young girl in Tehran, she gazed out at a field of stars against the darkness of night. She wished to look the other way, and see the shining earth against that dark veil, pierced by the light of stars.
She’s got her wish.
A global story.
She left Iran at the age of 16 just a few years after the Islamic Revolution, in part because her family wanted her to pursue her passion for the sciences to the fullest extent possible.
When she arrived, she knew next to no English except for a few verses from the song “My Favorite Things,” from the film “The Sound of Music.”
But within the next several years, Ansari had taught herself English, earned a university degree and landed a job at MCI earning just over $26,000. There she met her husband. Soon, she and her husband quit their jobs at MCI, cashed in their retirement savings, and ran up their credit cards to finance a telecommunications company they opened.
And they succeeded. They sold their company for a nominal half-billion dollars.
Then Anousheh Ansari helped fund the Ansari X-Prize. Good stuff.
Some disparage space tourism. As she points out, she went through 6 months of training to be able to fly, so it’s not exactly your typical tourism.
Leaving that aside, if people are willing to pay to ride to orbit, and know the risks; let them. Let someone other than taxpayers subsidize the space program.
For all my mabtw posts, societies that don’t value individual human beings (male or female), art, and don’t permit those individual human beings to ‘pursue happiness’ and fulfil their potential (male or female) … well they’re not very civilised societies. (Yeah, note I tossed in ‘art’ in the middle. That’s important too.)
This is the antithesis of the sort of woman that gets robustly criticized on mabtw. Oh, sure, I think she did much, much better for herself because she married well. But she’d have been a highly successful woman regardless.
The US (and capitalism in Russia!) made it possible for her to do something extraordinary that she could never have done in the theocracy of Iran. Good for her; good for her parents for seeing the need to emigrate. May Iran’s other sons and daughters be one day as free as she.
And may we all, at some point in life, slip the surly bonds of earth, reach out, and touch the face of God.
-wolfe
Lovely story. Throughout history, there have been many women who have excelled and done great things. WITHOUT the benefit of the feminist movement. You’ve either got the right stuff, or you don’t.
I grew up with that poem framed on the wall of our home. My father was an air force SAC pilot. I wanted very much to become a pilot. But my path was not to be thus and I found another way to touch the face of God.
That is a very pro-woman story, which is nice to see for a change, thanks…I am beginning to wonder what is going on though, what with the pink, blogging about a woman’s achievements in’all. Certainly seems unique considering the network this blog is a part of. I think you might be a non-conformist, wolfe.
!Abschicken!
@Teri God Bless your Dad.
@Female I’m building up street-cred with my female readers for my massive September girlie bikini-pic display.
Nah, seriously, I admire this woman. She’s cute too. (And yeah, that last is a sexist statement. Too bad.)
-wolfe
Seems like a lot of people on or around mabtw are into aeroplanes. I must confess that I am too, however, it’s really more of an interest in Richard Branson, than flying, per se.
wolfe, pls dont forget I have previously made a request for a pic of this person to appear at some stage.
http://static.flickr.com/44/111968157_a1bcc94aa4.jpg
Also, I don’t see how calling someone cute is sexist. Does that mean’t I’m sexist everytime I say Jake is HAWT!!1!11 ???
http://www.poster.net/gyllenhaal-jake/gyllenhaal-jake-photo-xl-jake-gyllenhaal-6234213.jpg
[...] Looking resolutely backwards, today’s post is, in some ways, the opposite of yesterday’s, though both concern explorers. Here we speak of a man who, six years ago, made a startling find that’s only recently received attention. [...]