What My Children Saw at Kennedy Space Center
Visiting Kennedy Space Center with my kids over President's Day Weekend — and meeting a real astronaut — was a reminder that excellence is never accidental. It is built deliberately, over decades.
"Daddy, please carry me so I can see."
My son said that as we walked into the room to watch the Atlantis film at Kennedy Space Center over President's Day Weekend. I put him on my shoulders. And standing there, with him above my three-year-old daughter beside us and me, I got hit with two things at once.
The first was pride. Visiting KSC does something to you. The place is a monument to what this country has actually accomplished — not what it promised, not what it aspired to — what it did. Impossible missions. Real failures. Real sacrifices. And then, somehow, success anyway. That is not a small thing.
The second hit harder. I watched my kids marvel at the machines and the scale of it, and I realized: I never had this at their age. Experiencing it with them, for the first time in some ways through their eyes, is something I will not take for granted.
Beyond the rockets and the shuttles, we got to meet Colonel Sherwood C. "Woody" Spring — West Point graduate, Vietnam combat veteran, experimental test pilot, NASA astronaut. He flew aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis on STS-61-B, conducted spacewalks, and helped deploy satellites. He shook my son's hand.
Having our kids in a room with someone like that is a privilege that is easy to understate. The way Woody Spring speaks about risk, pressure, and discipline — it reflects something you cannot fake. Decades of deliberate exposure to consequences most of us will never face. You can hear the difference.
The lesson my children absorbed that day, I hope, is the same one that place keeps teaching anyone willing to pay attention: excellence is not accidental. It is built brick by brick, deliberately, over a very long time.