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The Discovery, Titanic, BYU—all began with a dream. We must nail our colors to the mast to see the safety and success of our ship through.

This speech was given on September 10, 1985.

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"We live in a most remarkable age. The scope and magnificence of the daily events that swirl around us are now so commonplace that we scarcely note their presence or their passing.

Consider for example two events of this past week. One week ago this morning, on Tuesday, September 3, the space shuttle Discovery came riding out of a desert sky barely tinted with the light of sunrise and landed smoothly, silently on the sands of Edwards Air Force Base, concluding a weeklong experience that now seems almost routine in space travel.

Does it impress anyone (besides me) that this ninetynineton spaceship has orbited the earth before, that it repeatedly comes back to land safely, picks up yet another payload, and will again be launched beyond the earth’s gravity in the days that lie just ahead? Ho hum.

Does it matter to anyone that this piece of manmade magic—after traveling three million miles in space—can touch down on a postage stamp sketched in the dry lake bed of a California desert, a landing strip totally invisible from the Santa Monica freeway and the Carson City, Nevada, frozen yogurt station? May I remind you that there are 197,000,000 square miles of surface on the face of this planet onto which you can mistakenly land—or sink, as the case may be. What kind of a world is it—or should I say what kind of worlds are we about to find—in which that kind of technology, that kind of human genius, that kind of masterful, modern miracle can send up such a piece of equipment, fly it around, and bring it home with more accuracy than you and I find our automobile with after a BYU football game?

Is anyone impressed that on this particular flight James Van Hofton and William Fisher spent a casual weekend dangling in space and repairing with their screwdrivers, pliers, baling wire, and rubber bands an $85 million Syncom 3 satellite that had moved lifelessly in orbit since its abortive launch four months ago? “Never mind that there is an errant satellite up there, Chief. E.T. and I will just Buck Rogers it up into orbit, find that twentyfoot canister somewhere in all the grand immensity of space, sidle up alongside with the old jet pack, and have her beeping and flashing again in no time.” Easier than a trip to the corner gas station. Columbus I know and Balboa I know, but who are James Van Hofton and William Fisher?

Perhaps the amazement in all of this is greater for me than it is for you—and maybe is for most—because I am so mystified and unhandy at technical things. The only project I ever fully completed in my high school shop class was a onequart tin cup, which, by the time I was through making it, unfortunately had a large slash running down the full length of it. It’s very awkward to hold a quart of anything in a tin cup if it is running out onto your pant leg more rapidly than you are able to pour the new contents in. I did not get a good grade on that cup, and I did not get a good grade in the class. Very early on I left all technically related matters to other folks.

So I invite your sense of awe and wonder and appreciation for such a time in which we live, and, as we start a new school year at Brigham Young University, I also invite you to give thanks for the Godgiven blessings and benefits we enjoy routinely, day after day, week after week, in a way that has never been known by anyone, anywhere, in any other era of the history of all mankind.

Who Would Have Dreamed?

It is in that spirit and with that sense of privilege and advantage that I comment on the rather remarkable circumstances we presently enjoy right here in good old Provo, Utah—Happy Valley, U.S.A. Who would have dreamed in a thousand years of dreaming—that takes us back squarely into the shadow of the Dark Ages—that Brigham Young University would ever have a national championship football team and an overall athletic program ranked every year among the top ten in the nation? Where else does a university routinely enter its undergraduate coeds—year after year—in the Miss America contest and, this past year, claim the reigning queen?..."