Space, the final frontier

Today I came across this article about NASA building a moon base starting in 2020. And last week, Steven Hawking had this to say about humans colonizing space. What an exciting time to be in the field of astronomy.

The Wife has a bit of a daredevil streak in her, she’d like to go parasailing, hang-gliding, parachuting, those sorts of things. That stuff scares me and I’m always telling her she’s crazy for wanting to try those things. This summer, we were on the sky ride at an amusement park. I was sitting with Bronze while The Wife rode with Azure. I was terrified of losing her the entire ride. All I could think about was that there was just this little bar in front of us, and how easily Bronze could just slip under it and she’d be gone. She kept complaining about my death grip on her.


In complete contrast what you’d expect with my fears, I would love to be able to take part in a NASA mission. I wish I had the training to be able to add something useful enough to justify my going to the moon. I’d sign up in a heartbeat for that ride.

I’ve always had an interest in space and astronomy. Unfortunately, the one class I had on astronomy, the professor was in his final semester before retirement, about 90 years old, and extremely boring. Shortly after midterms, I couldn’t take it anymore and stopped going to his class. I kept doing the weekly labs, but missed out on any other homework he was assigning. Needless to say, my grade was suffering. Going into finals, he told us that it would be a 100 point final covering 6 chapters, with a 15 point extra credit question. I calculated that with the weighting he was giving to the final, I needed 108 points to pull out a B for the class. I stayed up all night, making an outline of each of those chapters, and cramming it into my brain. By the next morning, I had the shakes and an upset stomach from the anti-sleep potion I’d concocted. I got my final, breezed through the test questions, and nearly laughed out loud when I saw this extra credit question. “Please give an outline of one of the chapters covered on this test.” I got a 96 on the test, plus 15 points of extra credit, giving me 111 total for my B. Not that I’d recommend this approach to anyone, but it worked well for me.

Thus ended my study of astronomy, forever grounding me here on earth and relegating my trips to the moon to a pipedream. Unless I hit the lotto, then I’ll be calling Richard Branson.