Wait, NOW I'm Finding Out My Parents Knew an Astronaut?

On a personal note, I just only found out this Thanksgiving - and then verified during this Christmas - that my dad knew Ken Mattingly back in the 1960s when Mattingly was getting trained to be an Apollo astronaut.

It was just talking about how one of my cousin's daughters was about to graduate from Auburn University - where my mother and half her side of the family went to college - during the turkey dinner that my mom started talking about how Auburn was such a great aerospace school because guys like Mattingly went there. And then she started bringing up how Mattingly showed up at dad's place in Sanford Florida - where dad was stationed at the naval air field - just after he and my mom had gotten married in May 1966. According to the tale, Mattingly was there to invite my dad out for a night drinking, but dad pointed out the new wife and mentioned he married a girl from "a cow college." Mattingly asked which one, found out it was Auburn, and then he stayed the night chatting up my mom about all the people they knew back at school.

War Eagle.

So I'm sitting there at the Thanksgiving dinner table with my jaw hitting the floor yammering "you knew an APOLLO Astronaut?" and my mom was all "oh yeah this was all way before the Apollo 13 incident" - they saw the movie - and then she goes into talking about how that summer Mattingly left his car with my dad while Mattingly left for space training, and that my Aunt Dot - who was 16 at the time - spent all summer driving his car everywhere.

So while I emailed Aunt Dot thanking her for the crazy cat shirts she always sends me for Christmas gifts, I took a moment to ask her "hey did you really drive an astronaut's car everywhere during that summer?"

And Aunt Dot emailed back that yeah it was Mattingly's car - she said it was a Facel Vega - but that she only drove it one time to a picnic event. Also that Mattingly had a pet chihuahua named Fang.

And now here I am scouring the Worldcat catalog for ANY biography book on Mattingly for fact-checking the chihuahua part, and dammit you people never wrote a detailed biography on him.

And it's like, parents, dammit WHY did this never come up before that you guys knew a space astronaut? Astronauts are rare breeds, up there with rock stars and A-list actors, especially the guys from the 1960s space programs that did things like fly to the moon and back again.

All those years of driving to school in Tarpon Springs alongside mom (who taught there), watching the early morning shuttle launches at that intersection of Klosterman and Alt-19, and mom never said a word about knowing one of the shuttle commanders (Mattingly was one of the earliest, flying the Columbia to test its systems).

Also kind of sad to mention Mattingly passed away this last October, so I can't email him and confirm the whole Facel Vega and chihuahua stuff.

This is just still blowing my mind.

Io Saturnalia for 2020, And Not a Moment Too Soon

Tonight is December 17 and the official start to Saturnalia, as always an excuse to ask Mithras for presents and avoid the Krampus like the plague. Or have I gotten holiday traditions mixed up again?

Anywho, for a brief moment I would like to thank the planet Saturn for agreeing to meet with Jupiter to form a Great Conjunction in the night sky for December 21, here's hoping it doesn't cause any prophesied dooms on Earth, 'cause you know how the fake preachers around here like to grift their flocks whenever freaky sky stuff happens.

And if I can pass along to the Gift-Givers of the Solstice, I'm personally okay this year so I would instead ask the Powers That Be to make sure every trump-worshiping asshole refusing to wear masks in public all catch COVID-19 like they deserve and to keep every honest decent American wearing masks and trying to survive these last two months of trumpian bullshit safe from the pandemic. Gratias vobis ago.

And with that, a Saturnalia YouTube is in order!

Anniversary: Fifty Years Ago, We Achieved Humanity's Greatest Scientific Moment.

What it might have been like in July of 1969, watching as three men reached a faraway moon, and two of them landed there to prove humanity had the knowledge and the means to reach beyond our earthly shores.

From the Apollo 11 In Realtime website this morning

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we've waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting... - Carl Sagan

UPDATE: CBS News is running a livestream. I'm posting this 20 minutes before the landing itself.

UPDATE: "Tranquility Base here. The Eagle Has Landed."



I think I've asked Mom and Dad once what it was like for them watching this all happen in real time - my twin and I weren't born until 10 months later - but I can't recall now what they said. I think they were traveling in Europe at the time (Dad was doing a Mediterranean cruise as a Navy pilot then). Update again: Mom messaged back that she was staying with her parents in Birmingham at the time studying for her Masters, my older brother was two-ish so he probably was too young to notice, but she and my grandparents watched it all from the telly. She didn't join up with Dad in the Mediterranean until August.

Just to mention: The library where I work is doing a space-themed Summer Reading program, and part of it has been the dedication to the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing. One thing I helped work on is a Lego display of the Lunar Lander:

"That's One Small Step for a Lego... One... Giant Leap for Legokind!"

This Cool Thing: Live Apps Of the Apollo 11 Mission

OH MAN TODAY IS THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE APOLLO 11 MISSION TO LAND HEWMONS ON THE MOON.

July 16, 9:32 AM EDT.

CBS News - with Walter Cronkite, whose coverage of the space program is as legendary as the program itself - is replaying their broadcasts of the launch and the landing. Cool stuff.

There's also this live app - Apollo 11 In Real Time - running that simulates the Mission Control for the launch and mission.

The John F Kennedy Library - as JFK was the one who pushed for the moon landings as a decade-ending goal - is doing their own launch app.

EXCITING TIMES AGAIN, HEWMONS.

Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation.

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency...

- Kennedy's "We Choose To Go To the Moon" speech

My God, It's Full of Posters

I've been geeking out lately to something NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab just did.

As a means of promoting their endeavors to explore space, they created a series of Travelogue posters that one would find in a travel agency back in the 1950s-1960s. With an excellent eye to Art Deco style.

They call the series Visions of the Future.

They're beautiful.

I've been using them to decorate the library where I work as we're co-hosting a Sci-Fi street convention.

The only problem: I don't see one for Pluto.

O.o

They better work on that!

In Defiance of Gravity, the Shore of the Cosmic Ocean Calls To Us: A Remembrance of The Challenger

Just been reminded this morning that today is the 30th anniversary of the Challenger disaster.

I was at Tarpon Springs High at the time. This was 1986, decades before smartphones or even flip cell phones. Beepers were a luxury. Any connection to the outside world was through radio or television, and we didn't have cable in the schools so it was all wobbly antenna with bad reception.

I think they had a television going in the school library when it happened. Most of us were in class though, and we heard about it when the principal got on the speakers to announce the bad news.

Even with Tarpon Springs on the Gulf Coast, on some mornings when NASA was doing their launches from the Cape over on the Atlantic Coast, we could see on clear mornings the distant fire of the engines and the smoky contrails of a space shuttle launch. There was at least one launch like that I watched as we drove up Alt. US 19 towards Klosterman one morning, it was a beautiful sight.

The launch that morning for the Challenger didn't happen that early, so that was one I missed.

It was horrifying, what had happened. I saw the replays afterward on that television in the library.

And yet, we strove on. There had been another shuttle disaster years later - February 2003, the Columbia exploded on re-entry - yet we keep going into space, we keep finding other ways and make other plans.

All the dangers and risks of space travel, all the expense, is worth something. As much as the challenge itself as the means of expanding our knowledge of science, and improving our ability to survive in the harshest of environments to ensure the survival of our world.

As Kennedy once spoke in 1962 to argue for increasing funding to NASA:

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win...

And as Carl Sagan often reminded us:

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we've learned most of what we know. Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself...

Quick News: I Heart Pluto

We're getting close to the New Horizons fly-by of Pluto.  This is a big moment For Science!

We're already getting pictures in.

Pluto Loves Us And Wants Us to be Happy

So of course, the meme of the week is

I HEART PLUTO

Pluto is a planet.  That's what I learned in high school and dammit I'm not about to unlearn it now.

Also, we're hoping aliens.  We were promised aliens in all the video games.