Generation X Goes Back to the Future 8: The Space Shuttle Generation

Image Source: Chris Bray at Flickr via Yahoo.

A report from Yahoo shows a father and son watching the first Space Shuttle launch - and the last launch, thirty years later:

Thirty years ago, the first space shuttle launched into the stratosphere. Chris Bray and his father Kenneth watched -- and took a picture. Then last Friday, the shuttle Atlantis took its final trip. Again, the Bray men were there. And again, the two snapped a photo to capture the moment. 

The side-by-side photos, which are up on Chris Bray's Flickr photostream, immediately went viral on the Web.

The first shot shows 13-year-old Chris with then 39-year-old dad looking through binoculars at the space shuttle Columbia's first launch on April 12, 1981, from the Kennedy Space Center.

The second snap comes three decades later and recreates the same moment at the last shuttle voyage. The young son is now an adult. His father is now gray-haired.

Chris Bray wrote on his Flickr page of the side-by-side images: "The picture we waited 30 years to complete."

This side-by-side view captures the Generation X experience of growing up through the Technological Revolution in a nutshell.  Previous generations of course remember society before the Tech and Info booms hit full force.  But these explosive developments were not bound up with their collective childhood, adolescence and identity.  As Gen X grew, so did the technological world, and only that generation exactly straddles the time that came before, and the period that followed.

See all my posts on Gen X.