He wants to go "out there":
All at once, the passengers contorted themselves to get a view out of the starboard windows.
And there it was. The actual shuttle, the space shuttle Discovery, piggybacking a ride atop a Boeing 747, on the way to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, where it would be retired. A ripple of excitement -- boyish, unvarnished excitement -- moved through the cabin.
It was an entrancing sight, and completely improbable, especially to people like me, who still don’t quite understand how a 747 gets into the air, even without a space shuttle as carry-on luggage.
The 747 and the space shuttle made a pass over the Washington Monument and the capital’s other grand marble temples, all consecrated to the American idea. They gleamed in the sun as they received a salute from a spacecraft that represented the physical manifestation of American ingenuity and confidence.
Then the 747 left our view. We settled back into our seats, having been elevated for a moment by a magnificent and elegiac vision -- elegiac, because the end of the shuttle program marks the first time since the dawn of the Space Age that the U.S. government has no immediate plan to launch humans into space.
A few minutes later, while we were still parked on the tarmac, ... the plane’s steering seemed to be malfunctioning. ...
We returned to the terminal, and I watched on CNN as Discovery finished the journey to its nursing home in the Virginia countryside. Only then did the obvious thought cross my mind: Newt is right.
This isn’t a thought that has often crossed my mind, especially over the past several months, but on the matter of space exploration and the role it has played in teaching Americans that they are capable of performing exceptional acts of creativity and bravery, Newt Gingrich is exactly right.
Read the whole thing, here.
KIRK: Ahead Warp One, Mr. Sulu.
DIFALCO: Heading, sir?
KIRK: Out there. Thataway.
