Tag: Opinion

Actually 7 new windows, courtesy of STS-130, the 130th Shuttle mission ending (hopefully) today. If you’ve been keeping track over the last 13 days, you know our brave astronauts have finished installing an observation module on the International Space Station with 7 new windows, called the Cuppola. The view should be amazing and useful. Why even have a Space Station if you can’t look out the window?

Of all the things we do as US citizens, this is one of the coolest. We fly people into space, and look at stuff. The Space Shuttle program is winding down. This is one of the few remaining flights. It’s been an epic period in human history, of which we as citizens can all be proud.

We wish the citizen astronauts of STS-130 well on their safe return to the planet. In terms of media attention, we sometimes focus on the idiotic and trivial, while wonderous and heroic things happening all around us seemingly go unnoticed. Not unnoticed here. It’s Really Redding.

I wonder if the time hasn’t come to consider something a bit more radical for nascent Stillwater than just waiting around to see who might show up. Redding is in need of turning a retail economic base into a manufacturing base. We don’t need shopping malls, we need factories. Is there a natural resource here that we can leverage into a finished good? That was key to our past success in mining and lumber. What can we do now? Is it possible to turn our industrial park into something that produces value now and in the future? How about a center for renewable energy products? Maybe software, or games production? These things have great value, and basis elsewhere. But what if we put our minds and hearts into becoming the new nexus for these high value products? What can we offer if we WILL it to be?

I just don’t see why we have to wait for ‘something” to come along. We can make it happen. Just us. Local people working together. I believe that.