As a kid, I always had a fascination with space. And not the fiction space (like Star Wars), but real life human efforts to go to outer space. Sputnik, NASA, the moon missions, the Voyager probes, the space shuttles, EVA, zero and low gravity environments, etc. As I grew up, this fascination slowly faded away (while the school system tried to mold me into the perfect citizen...).

In some sense, you can say we, as a people, also lost this fascination of space. The drive to explore and conquer it. In fact, its likely that we think of it as a waste of precious resources, given the Challenger disaster in 1986 and, more recently, the Columbia disaster in 2003. So in many ways, my loss of the fascination of space may just reflect the whims of society in general, despite the efforts of great movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Apollo 13.