It’s sometimes surprising to remember that astronauts like Chris Ferguson are still a part of our present, not some fetishized nostalgia item like glass Coke bottles. We don’t bow to airplane pilots the way we once did (except, perhaps, Sully), and Presidents are more the subjects of derision than idolatry. But astronauts remain astronauts: pure and heroic in a way that’s rarely summoned outside childhood, the fifties, or rare moments of national unity. Is it that the vastness of space is so powerful that it inspires even in adults a childlike sense of wonder, or that we all still remember that feeling from when we were young—of limitlessness, of the unknown, of the unknowable—and access it each time we think about what lies above the clouds?

America’s “not gonna stop exploring,” perhaps, but surely some of the dignity will be drained as exploration becomes more of a business than a federal exercise of the public imagination. It’s hard to picture words like Ferguson’s coming from the captain of the SpaceX Dragon, which you may be able to ride in 2014, for only twenty million dollars a seat, and sad to envision space as the next pony or Disneyland—a world that children more often whine than ponder.

Poking around the NASA site this morning, I found myself especially touched by the crew’s morning routine. Each day begins with a wake-up call—usually in musical form, and often with a recorded greeting from the artist. The crew members pick the playlist, along with friends and family. The last wake-up call of the space shuttle mission was Kate Smith’s version of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” The day before: “Fanfare for the Common Man.” And the video below comes from Day 7: R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon.” Maybe it’s just that I most loved Michael Stipe around the same time I most loved outer space, but I find something lovely in picturing the people heading up to the space station, or those waiting for them down below, selecting a song so earnestly on-point, and something moving in watching it delivered to this hunk of metal—a sci-fi movie today would have it be far sleeker—suspended above Earth.