Keep the Dream Alive – Stephen Savitzky

In the year of Nineteen Eighty Six,

On an icy winter’s day

The shuttle Challenger left the pad

And started on her way

The shuttle Challenger lifted off

With seven brave women and men

In flames they died just ten miles high,

And never came home again.

Never came home again,

In flames they died just ten miles high

And never came home again.

And seventeen years later

Nearly forty miles high,

Columbia’s wreckage wrote a line

Of fire across the sky

But long before the jetstream blew

Her trail of smoke away

We saw that it marked a highway

We would travel again some day.

–2003–02–01

So never say that they died in vain

Nor stay on the ground afraid,

The stars are one step closer now

Because of the price we’ve paid.

And mourn for the shuttles that fly no more,

And weep for the friends we’ve lost,

But to leave the Earth will still be worth

Whatever it has to cost.

And fire no guns in last salute

But let the rockets roar,

And reach for the wide and starry sky

As Challenger did before.

And raise no earthbound slab of stone,

To mark the place they lie,

But write their names with a shuttle’s flames,

Ten miles in the sky.

And here’s a toast to the shuttle crews

Who died for the dream of space

And all the pioneers who have

The sky for a resting place.

No grave nor tombstone do they need,

For their memory will survive

As long as we fly beyond the sky

And keep the dream alive.

Keep the dream alive,

As long as we fly beyond the sky

And keep the dream alive.

Keep the dream alive,

Let the shuttles fly beyond the sky

And keep the dream alive.

Space Monkey from Leo Burnett on Vimeo.