Outer Space

Outer Space by Bill Federer

The first person to orbit the earth in space was Russian-Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961, followed by American astronaut John Glenn, February 20, 1962.

From 1981 to 2011, the Space Shuttle program flew 135 missions which orbited the earth launching satellites, interplanetary probes, the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as performing scientific experiments and building the International Space Station.

In 1984, astronauts Captain Bruce McCandles and Brigadier General Robert Lee Stewart stepped out of the Space Shuttle Challenger and performed the first un-tethered extravehicular activities using Manned Maneuvering Units, while orbiting a million feet above the earth.

In an interview with Reasons to Believe, October 1, 2000, General Bob Stewart, who had been a combat helicopter pilot in Vietnam, logged 289 hours in space. He stated:

"Your first view of the home planet is breathtaking. Maybe that's how God intended it to be viewed ..

"...I had been teaching a Sunday school class at High View Baptist Church in Woodland Park and the class had decided that they wanted to study Genesis ...

"...The message I hoped to get across was that you don't have to give up your intellect to be a Christian ... It gets harder to reach a person for Christ when that person is highly educated and sure of the primacy of science in this world ...

"... This universe was brought into existence out of nothingness; that it is especially fine-tuned for the existence of life on this rare, if not unique planet; and that God did it ...

"...I led off with a primer on relativity so my class could see the historical and logical background of this theory and lose their fear of it. This was necessary because I intended to talk about the creation event in terms of the big bang, and I wanted my class to understand that this was not just something physicists thought up in a vacuum.

"I wanted to approach the existence of human beings on this planet from the standpoint of their unique relationship to the Creator and back that up with some modern numerical biology statistics concerning the probabilities of life existing at all from random processes ...

"I hope to continue to challenge the person who is scientifically oriented with the idea that life would be prohibitively unlikely unless it were created by God ...

In my life I have made a remarkable transition from a person whose faith was in science to the exclusion of religion, to being a person who holds the Scriptures to be truth with science just catching up after 4000 years."

The courage and risks of space travel were realized with the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger, which exploded just 73 seconds after lift-off on JANUARY 28, 1986 and then again with the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia, which broke apart on re-entry in February 1, 2003, killing the entire crew.

When Challenger's entire seven member crew was killed, including a high school teacher-the first private citizen to fly aboard the craft, President Ronald Reagan stated:

"Today is a day for mourning ... a national loss ... The members of the Challenger crew were pioneers ...The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future ..The crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives.

"We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.'"

"There's a coincidence today. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama.... In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, 'He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.'

Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete."