80s News Today

Let us journey back to January 8, 1981, to a place in France so delightfully obscure it practically begged for something utterly out of the ordinary to happen: Trans-en-Provence. Now, Trans-en-Provence is, by all accounts, a perfectly normal, entirely un-interstellar sort of village. The kind of place where the biggest excitement is probably a well-baked baguette or a spirited debate about the correct ripeness of cheese. So, you can imagine the sheer, unadulterated bafflement that must have descended upon Monsieur Renato Nicolai, a gentleman of a robust seventy-five years, when his otherwise unremarkable day took a turn for the cosmically peculiar. Mr Nicolai, being a practical sort, was not the type to gaze at the stars pondering the meaning of life; he was more concerned with whether the pump would survive another Provençal winter. Life, for him, was straightforward: earth, sky, cheese, occasional glass of rosé. Then came the whistle. Not a particularly dramatic whistle, mind you...

Cape Canaveral, Florida - August 8, 1989 Well, now, lookee here, folks! It’s August of ’89, the tail end of the Reagan Rhapsody, the air thick with the scent of Aqua Net and the clatter of yuppie wingtips on the marble floors of power. And down there in the steamy flats of Florida, at that cathedral of chrome and chill steel they call Cape Canaveral, something peculiar is afoot. Forget your splashy satellite launches with the network news anchors breathlessly narrating the banalities. This ain’t that kind of rodeo, podner. This one, see, has got that purple storm shroud of the unsaid . The Space Shuttle Columbia, that magnificent white dart of American ingenuity, is perched on the launchpad, all fueled up and ready to rumble. But this time? This time it’s…different. Oh, they went through the motions, you betcha. The pre-flight checks, the laconic pronouncements from Mission Control, the whole nine yards of NASA niceties. But there was a hush in the air, a certain... obfuscation , shall...