Imaginary Church

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

NASA is in the news lately about the samples it has analyzed from an asteroid named Bennu . Bringing that back to the quote about imagination: a group of people at NASA imagined a way to build a spacecraft that could intercept an asteroid that’s in a similar orbit around our Sun as the Earth’s; land on it and gather some samples; and return those samples back to Earth. I think that’s neat, like flying a helicopter on Mars . Because somewhere right now, a child might be drawing their own fantastic space mission - perhaps a solar-powered butterfly net catching stardust. And it may become reality one day.

About the author

Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, vicomte de Saint-Exupéry (29 June 1900 – c. 31 July 1944), known simply as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was a French writer, poet, journalist and aviator.