It is December 11th, 1998. The sleek spacecraft sits on the pad at Cape Canaveral, high atop a Delta 7925 rocket.

 As the countdown spins toward zero, a redundant series marsclimateorbiterof supercomputers provide management for the rocket’s thruster systems. The zero stage solid fuel engine ignites on cue, burning for precisely 64 seconds, giving way to a 265-second burn of the RS-27C motor burning a blend of lox/kerosene fuel. 

The spacecraft is propelled to an initial 185 kilometer by 198 kilometer by 28.4 degree parking orbit around the earth. 

Then a second burn raises the apogee to around 900 kilometers, setting the stage for the Thiokol Star 48 engine’s 88-second burn. This accelerates the craft into a trans-Martian trajectory.

Nine and a half-months and 416 million miles later, a small Leros bi-propellant engine will provide the on-board propulsion for the orbit insertion maneuver at Mars.

The Climate Orbiter will then use aero-braking to reach a sun-synchronous mapping orbit by November 23rd, 1999. 

The mission is to map the Martian surface at high resolution, and study the distribution of water vapor and ozone, along with other climate-related tasks.

It is a brilliant plan. But it has one flaw.


Engineers at Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Colorado have apparently calculated acceleration data in English units of pounds of force. This data has been fed into a computer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California that assumes metric units of acceleration. Units called newtons.

And on September 23rd, 1999, the little Leros bi-propellant engine ignites as planned and small thrusters fire to perform the orbit-insertion maneuver. 

But nine and a half months and 416 million miles worth of tiny, undetected errors caused by using units of English measurement rather than metric, extrapolate into a catastrophic accident that ends the life of the 125 million dollar spacecraft.

Oops!

_____

You see, you can’t get to Mars by using outdated standards, obsolete measurements, and no-longer applicable guidelines.

And you can’t live into the future by clinging to the past.

That’s why faith is always future-oriented, adapting itself to this ever-changing, always-expanding universe of life. Nothing remains constant – not the space around us, the ground under us, or even…US!

Life is a moving object!

And faith, it seems to me, is actually a force that propels us forward, setting people free to experience (and enjoy!) the unfolding magnificence of the universe as it expands along the arrow of time (remember that in my last post?). In this sense, the Bible reads like a science book describing the evolution of the cosmos, telling the human story of change and movement – from the Garden to east of Eden, from Ur to Canaan, from Canaan to Egypt, from Egypt to the wilderness, from the wilderness to the Promised Land, from the Promised Land to the diaspora, and onward. And each new relocation brings with it the need to adapt – to change – and to find new ways of living as the people of God.

And the forward motion of our human family is not just geographic and sociological. It is also personal and biological. All human beings move from birth to life to death to…resurrection…to…??

So what’s with all this “Gimme that old time religion” crap?

Too often we people of faith try to hold onto a past that attempts to defy the arrow of time. Traveling the wrong way on time’s one way street, we become incapable of dealing with the changes going on in the world around us.  Using English measurements when life demands metric (that’s a metaphor), we do not realize the full richness of ourselves and others as the human beings God created us to be – explorers, adventurers, and friends of Buzz Lightyear moving out to “infinity and beyond!”

And we miss out on the always-expanding beauty of the cosmos.

Have you ever seen the breathtaking photographs taken of deep space by the Hubble Telescope? Way out at the edges of the universe we can see billions of spiraling galaxies, exploding stars, colorful nebulae and – even though we can only measure but not observe it – all sorts of “dark matter”.

You can’t help but gasp at the beauty of it all!

What do you suppose would happen if – cherishing our old time religion but not clinging to it – we let our faith climb aboard the arrow of time and evolve into the future just like the universe does? What do you suppose it would look like today? How about tomorrow?

Perhaps, if we really could adopt a faith oriented to the future and not the past, we’d find ourselves singing, “Gimme that NEW time religion!”

After all, that’s the song Jesus sang!