Dreams are crushed | The Salt Lake Tribune

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The closing of The Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center is a tragedy ("Alpine District closes popular space center — for now," Tribune, Oct. 25). The Alpine School District gave a vague plan for the center's future; that is not good enough.

While the space center is closed, dreams are being crushed, because they are not being allowed to form.

The McAuliffe center altered the course of my life. Because of it, I graduated from Harvard with degrees in astrophysics and Earth and planetary sciences. I then designed and built scientific instruments that went to the South Pole to study the beginning of the universe.

I am now preparing for doctoral work that will entail researching Europa, a moon of Jupiter that I first learned about 12 years ago on my first visit to the center. None of that would be true if it had been "temporarily" closed back when I was 10.

The space center helped me turn my dreams into reality, and mine is just one of thousands of stories.

The Alpine School District has unnecessarily ended the production of those stories. It should reopen now the parts of the center that are not a safety risk.

Kristi Bradford

New York City