I watched the final shuttle launch this morning; for several years I've tried to catch shuttle events, knowing it would soon be over, but before that the shuttle had faded into the background for me as it did for so many of us. It was an impractical rocket to nowhere that we mostly only paid attention to when it blew up.

Fourteen years ago today, Debian was flying in space aboard Columbia. According to the press release, it ran on an SSD on an embedded 486 in the lab module, and controlled plant watering, telemetry, and video. At the time, I had just become a Debian developer, and was very impressed to be part of a project that was involved in that. It was early days for Debian, and near the midpoint of the shuttle's thirty years.

Now it seems likely that Debian, or its derivatives (or at least Free Software) will easily outlast that thirty year run, but I do wonder to what extent our work will fade into the background (and what interesting ways it will find to explode) over that time span and beyond. We'd say we have better methods than the centralized, committee-driven, top-down, PR-conscious NASA... impressive though it can be at its best. We have dreams just as noble as the ones behind the space program, but also goals that are more adaptable, equally at home flying in space, or emebdded in some pocket-lint laden artifact of a perhaps more contemporary inward turn.