When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. Be honest: you, too, right? I know you nodded yes, especially if you’re a man.
Of course, for the vast majority of us, the dream dies, and it died quickly for me. Probably ’round the time I started reading SF, my mind so expanded that the space program seemed quaint by comparison. But there’s a kernel that’s still there, buried deep. Once, under the influence of too much alcohol and well under the legal drinking age, I remember laying on my back in my friend’s yard, staring up at the dozen or so stars defiantly poking out through the light-polluted North Jersey skies. I focused on Deneb, bright corner of the summer triangle asterism. How I’d love to voyage there and see your blue-white worlds! What would I possibly glimpse out of the porthole of my starship?
Let’s back up 1,400 light years, shall we?
I was privileged to have a lot of books as a kid, especially reference and non-fiction stuff. I had a set of “Explorer” booklets, about a dozen or so, and each one highlighted an explorer: Columbus, Magellan, Captain Cook, Stanley of “and Livingston” fame. I can still visualize those slim books now, feel them in my hands, the slick thick white pages, the somewhat artsy line drawings, the bright colors. My favorite one was the one that stood out, the last one of the series. No colorful hand-drawn illustrations, here. No, it had black-and-white photos. Cape Canaveral. The Mercury capsule. The launch pad, the metallic space suit. The last Explorer book was about John Glenn.
As a young teen I remember The Right Stuff vividly. Saw it in the theaters and a dozen times since, and I’m scratching my head, wondering, why don’t I have that on DVD? I have a bunch of other stuff concerning the US space program, DVDs I’ve acquired over the years. Fifteen or so years ago I read Tom Wolfe’s book and was so overwhelmed with that combination of courage and machismo that’s, well, the “right stuff.” But I think I admire more the newer breed of astronaut – from the “New Nine”, the group immediately following the Mercury Seven, up to the modern-day astronauts flying that outdated road-to-nowhere called the space shuttle. Starting with the New Nine, astronauts were now required to have, in addition to the “right stuff”, PhDs. This was right up my alley way-back-when. Courageous, macho eggheads.
The most wonderful and fascinating thing about the space program – from the strained and nervous attempts to actually launch a man into space to those bootprints on the surface of a world 240,000 miles away – was that it accomplished all its stated goals. And with the technology back then! The laptop I’m writing this on has more computational power than the Lunar Module that flew men the 70 miles down from lunar orbit to lunar surface and back up safely again. Incredible. Absolutely incredible. This was the era of those giant IBM mainframes with punchcards the size of your hand. Besides that, just how much navigational computation was done by hand, by twentysomething engineering grads, double- and triple-checked by other recent grads, furiously etching equations, chugging coffee and chain-smoking cigarettes. My wife and I never cease to wonder about this aspect of the whole thing whenever we watch specials about this.
Last summer I read a couple of truly fascinating books on the whole Apollo program and it reawakened a lot of these feelings. Though I was too young to remember the actual landing (the first NASA event I consciously remember, vaguely, is the Viking landings on Mars), I still get flushed with pride whenever I read or watch documentaries about the moon landing on teevee. What goes through your mind when you see that rocket thundering up past the swiveling tower, the black and white rocket with the red letters U ... S … A and all those frozen chips of liquid oxygen tumbling earthward? I don’t know about you, but I always get a terminal case of goosebumps.
So over the past year or so I’ve researched the program in depth and have written a bunch of essays and summaries and chronologies and trivia pages and all sorts of geeky goodness. But it’s more than geekiness; it’s pride, national pride. Let’s me ask a serious question: how much pride do you see out there, today? Obama, the master of doing exactly the opposite of what he’s says, has effectively eviscerated the manned space program. Even Neil Armstrong is speaking out about that. But though politics birthed the space race, let’s leave politics out of the discussion right now. I’m thinking very seriously of putting all this stuff I’ve written up on the web at my own site. I’m working with another company that’s teaching me all the technical and marketing end of bringing such a project to fruition. If I may be bold, it does seem at times to be a task as herculean as landing a man on the moon. I’ve done it in fits and starts over the last nine months or so. My goal is to get it up and running by my own one-year anniversary with the space program, in mid-July.
Maybe once a week or once every ten days I’ll post a little update, just to keep my feet to the fire. There’s a weird pull in me to this, so I’m just going to go full speed ahead, I suppose. Yeah, there are higher callings for creating a website to me, such as one devoted to science fiction books or Catholicism, but those topics are both so broad that I’d need to seriously pare it down to get something viable to work with. So if this idea works, good; if it doesn’t, also good, because it’ll be a learning experience.
All right, I’ve said too much already. Talk to you tomorrow …
Of course, for the vast majority of us, the dream dies, and it died quickly for me. Probably ’round the time I started reading SF, my mind so expanded that the space program seemed quaint by comparison. But there’s a kernel that’s still there, buried deep. Once, under the influence of too much alcohol and well under the legal drinking age, I remember laying on my back in my friend’s yard, staring up at the dozen or so stars defiantly poking out through the light-polluted North Jersey skies. I focused on Deneb, bright corner of the summer triangle asterism. How I’d love to voyage there and see your blue-white worlds! What would I possibly glimpse out of the porthole of my starship?
Let’s back up 1,400 light years, shall we?
I was privileged to have a lot of books as a kid, especially reference and non-fiction stuff. I had a set of “Explorer” booklets, about a dozen or so, and each one highlighted an explorer: Columbus, Magellan, Captain Cook, Stanley of “and Livingston” fame. I can still visualize those slim books now, feel them in my hands, the slick thick white pages, the somewhat artsy line drawings, the bright colors. My favorite one was the one that stood out, the last one of the series. No colorful hand-drawn illustrations, here. No, it had black-and-white photos. Cape Canaveral. The Mercury capsule. The launch pad, the metallic space suit. The last Explorer book was about John Glenn.
As a young teen I remember The Right Stuff vividly. Saw it in the theaters and a dozen times since, and I’m scratching my head, wondering, why don’t I have that on DVD? I have a bunch of other stuff concerning the US space program, DVDs I’ve acquired over the years. Fifteen or so years ago I read Tom Wolfe’s book and was so overwhelmed with that combination of courage and machismo that’s, well, the “right stuff.” But I think I admire more the newer breed of astronaut – from the “New Nine”, the group immediately following the Mercury Seven, up to the modern-day astronauts flying that outdated road-to-nowhere called the space shuttle. Starting with the New Nine, astronauts were now required to have, in addition to the “right stuff”, PhDs. This was right up my alley way-back-when. Courageous, macho eggheads.
The most wonderful and fascinating thing about the space program – from the strained and nervous attempts to actually launch a man into space to those bootprints on the surface of a world 240,000 miles away – was that it accomplished all its stated goals. And with the technology back then! The laptop I’m writing this on has more computational power than the Lunar Module that flew men the 70 miles down from lunar orbit to lunar surface and back up safely again. Incredible. Absolutely incredible. This was the era of those giant IBM mainframes with punchcards the size of your hand. Besides that, just how much navigational computation was done by hand, by twentysomething engineering grads, double- and triple-checked by other recent grads, furiously etching equations, chugging coffee and chain-smoking cigarettes. My wife and I never cease to wonder about this aspect of the whole thing whenever we watch specials about this.
Last summer I read a couple of truly fascinating books on the whole Apollo program and it reawakened a lot of these feelings. Though I was too young to remember the actual landing (the first NASA event I consciously remember, vaguely, is the Viking landings on Mars), I still get flushed with pride whenever I read or watch documentaries about the moon landing on teevee. What goes through your mind when you see that rocket thundering up past the swiveling tower, the black and white rocket with the red letters U ... S … A and all those frozen chips of liquid oxygen tumbling earthward? I don’t know about you, but I always get a terminal case of goosebumps.
So over the past year or so I’ve researched the program in depth and have written a bunch of essays and summaries and chronologies and trivia pages and all sorts of geeky goodness. But it’s more than geekiness; it’s pride, national pride. Let’s me ask a serious question: how much pride do you see out there, today? Obama, the master of doing exactly the opposite of what he’s says, has effectively eviscerated the manned space program. Even Neil Armstrong is speaking out about that. But though politics birthed the space race, let’s leave politics out of the discussion right now. I’m thinking very seriously of putting all this stuff I’ve written up on the web at my own site. I’m working with another company that’s teaching me all the technical and marketing end of bringing such a project to fruition. If I may be bold, it does seem at times to be a task as herculean as landing a man on the moon. I’ve done it in fits and starts over the last nine months or so. My goal is to get it up and running by my own one-year anniversary with the space program, in mid-July.
Maybe once a week or once every ten days I’ll post a little update, just to keep my feet to the fire. There’s a weird pull in me to this, so I’m just going to go full speed ahead, I suppose. Yeah, there are higher callings for creating a website to me, such as one devoted to science fiction books or Catholicism, but those topics are both so broad that I’d need to seriously pare it down to get something viable to work with. So if this idea works, good; if it doesn’t, also good, because it’ll be a learning experience.
All right, I’ve said too much already. Talk to you tomorrow …
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