Blackford County Receives RLF Funding

Anyone searching for an example of how hard work can pay off need look no further than Blackford County's Kevin Ford.

Ford will rocket into orbit aboard the space shuttle Discovery as its pilot. Liftoff was scheduled for early this morning, but a bad fuel valve forced the launch to be scrubbed. No new launch date has been set.

Ford's education résumé tells the story of someone committed to the rigors of academia -- and to the adventure of exploration.

He holds degrees in aerospace engineering and a doctorate in astronautical engineering. He has flown F-15s and conducted test flights in the F-16. NASA selected the Blackford High School graduate of 1978 as a pilot in July 2000. He served as director of operations at the Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, for a year.

That's just a thumbnail of what he's accomplished, but you get the idea. This guy is smart.

Ford has been reaching for the stars in anticipation of a shuttle flight for most of his adult life.

Make no mistake, Ford is an explorer and his job entails danger.

Despite two shuttle tragedies, we in the media have made space travel seem routine, if not downright boring. Shuttle launches are mostly relegated to a 10-second clip on the network news shows, or a brief in the local paper.

Ford's shuttle mission -- delivering more cargo and supplies to the International Space Station -- is not terribly newsworthy to most people.

But let's not lose sight of the fact that riding a space shuttle into orbit is fraught with dangers. By now, everyone is familiar with the consequences of fuel tank foam hitting the thermal tiles of the orbiter. But that's just one of potentially thousands of things that can go wrong on a flight. A faulty fuel valve is among them.

NASA's scientists and engineers have devised scenarios and procedures to take these dangers into account. But there will always be the chance that something bad might happen. Space is an extreme and it takes extreme people to journey into it.

Kevin Ford is one of those extraordinary people.

It's probably a safe bet that your chances of being struck by lightning are better than being selected to ride a space shuttle. NASA obviously has the luxury of selecting the best and the brightest to join its astronaut corps.

Ford, to use the cliché, has "the right stuff" to pilot NASA's shuttle. And we have a good role model to look up to when we think about the stars.