The headline pretty much says it all: SpaceX, the commercial spaceflight company that’s leading the pack with its amazing Falcon boosters and Dragon spacecraft, plans to finally reveal its human-rated version of the Dragon in a live webcast this evening at 7 PM Pacific time. This variant of the existing Dragon design will reportedly have seating for seven astronauts, a major step up from the three-person Soyuz capsules that have been ferrying personnel to and from the ISS since the space shuttles were retired three years ago. And it couldn’t come at a better time, either, considering the impact that the current diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and Russia is having on our joint space operations.

I confess, I still miss the sight and the runway-landing concept of my beloved shuttles — as an aside, I’m looking forward to the first orbital flight of the shuttle-like DreamChaser being developed by Sierra Nevada Corp., currently planned for 2016 — but those guys at SpaceX have become heroes of mine with their rapid string of successes. Remember that this company designs and builds most of its own hardware in-house, and that it’s only been around for 12 years. In that time, it’s gone from square one to operating a field-tested, reusable, reliable spacecraft and booster system, a pretty remarkable achievement any way you look at it. And Elon Musk, the company’s founder, seems to have a strong and audacious vision for the future, with talk of sending humans to Mars and the company’s exploration into landing spacecraft on their tails like the old-fashioned movie rocketships of the 1950s. This is all potentially very exciting stuff… we may still get that spacegoing future we once believed in…

It’s a gloomy, cold day here in the SLC, and as I watch a light flurry of snow flutter past my windows on the 13th Floor, I’m feeling a little melancholy and nostalgic. (“What?!” you’re probably thinking, “Bennion? Melancholy and nostalgic? The deuce you say!” Yeah, yeah, I know… but it is true.) Seems an appropriate time to post this, a moody image from days not that far gone, but which may as well be a century ago…

I miss these old girls, and the future they once represented… the one I once imagined…

Photo source here; thanks to my buddy Mike Gillilan for passing me the link.

It’s been a hell of a week, hasn’t it? What say we enter the weekend on a more positive note, something that speaks of human curiosity and wonder rather than bloodshed? Something like… a photograph that looks like it came from a science fiction movie, but was in fact taken from the Mojave Desert on April 3:

This was floating around the web a couple weeks ago, so my apologies if you’ve already seen it, but I’m just blown away by this. I’ll confess, I haven’t been nearly as enthusiastic about this vehicle — Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo — as I have with the other commercial spacecraft currently in development (or, in the case of the SpaceX Dragon, in operation!). While SpaceShipTwo is technically a spaceship — it’s designed to fly above the 62-mile altitude that’s commonly held to be the boundary of space — it’s incapable of reaching the ISS or achieving even low-Earth orbit. Its flightplans will consist, essentially, of big parabolic hops. And its missions will be little more than tourist larks for the wealthy, rather than anything really practical or that furthers human exploration or expansion into space. In my mind, it’s more of a toy than a real ship.

That said, though, it is a pretty machine, and we may learn much from it once it goes into operation. Also, it will keep manned spaceflight — of a sort — in the public eye, which I think is of vital importance. And of course, it will provide photo ops like this one, which is just spectacular. I think a big part of its appeal is that, to old-school nerds such as myself, it’s so familiar from our cinematic fantasies — a friend of mine said when he saw this photo, his first thought was of the Starship Enterprise hanging in the sky in the original Star Trek episode “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” and I immediately knew what he was talking about — but it’s real. The future is happening now.  And that’s pretty damn cool…

The photo’s source and a lot more information about SpaceShipTwo can be found here. Have a good weekend, everyone!

The Saturn V rocket boosters that sent the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon were incredible machines: immense in scale, mind-bogglingly complex in design, more powerful than any vehicle built before or since. If you don’t believe that particular superlative, here are some stats that might convince you: the F1 engine developed for the Saturns produced 1.5 million pounds of thrust, which amounts to 32 million horsepower. Compare that to my ’03 Mustang, a fairly peppy little ride on a meager 300 horses. And the Saturn V’s first stage, the one that actually lifted the whole stack off the ground and hurled it into the sky, was driven by five F1s. Think of it this way: The Saturns were gigantic, rampaging beasts harnessed and tamed to suit the dreams of we puny humans.

Sadly, there are only three of these Titans remaining, birds intended for the Moon that had their wings clipped when the Nixon administration shut down the Apollo program prematurely. They now stand — or, more accurately, lay, since they’re so huge, they’re more conveniently displayed horizontally — at Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers, and at the Huntsville Space and Rocket Center, all taxidermied examples of an extinct species. And remember, those are rockets that never got the chance to go anywhere. There are no examples of used Saturn V hardware on display anywhere in the world. The Saturns were never meant to return home after their one glorious flight. Their first stages fell into the Pacific Ocean; their second stages burned up when they re-entered Earth’s atmosphere; and the third stages that flung the Apollo capsules moonward were directed to either hit the Moon themselves, or were thrown out into space to get them out of the way. Unlike the Apollo command modules (two of which I’ve seen in person, including Apollo 11’s Columbia capsule, i.e., the one Neil Armstrong was on), you can’t stand in any museum in the world and look upon a Saturn that’s done its job and come back to tell us about it.

Not yet anyway. But maybe in a year or two…

An expedition financed by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and the spaceflight company Blue Origin — a friendly competitor to SpaceX — has found and recovered two mission-flown Saturn V F1 engines from three miles down in the Atlantic:

Bezos was aboard the salvage ship Seabed Worker during the search and recovery operation, and he describes a underwater graveyard of Saturn components, “an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end.” The two units brought up by the team are rusty, shattered hulks, as you can see in the photo above, but Bezos’ intent is to restore them and get them into museums — the Smithsonian and Seattle’s Museum of Flight have been mentioned — where the hardware can “tell its true story, including its 5,000 mile per hour re-entry and subsequent impact with the ocean surface. We’re excited to get this hardware on display where just maybe it will inspire something amazing.”

Naturally, this being the age of cynical pragmatists with no sense of wonder, I’m seeing snarky online comments from people asking “why?” and “what’s the point?” and “couldn’t he have spent his money on something more useful?” (as if inspiring wonder in our children isn’t something useful). This attitude makes my eyelid twitch.

Look, it’s true… there probably isn’t any practical benefit to raising these things. I kind of doubt, for example, that they can provide any useful new information about how they performed or what stresses they were subjected to, at least not after 40-some years on the bottom of the ocean. I’m pretty sure the designers of the next generation of heavy-lift rockets have complete technical data on those engines already. But does everything we do these days have to carry a practical benefit, or a material return on investment, i.e., make a profit? With that attitude, why not just close the fricking Smithsonian right now? What’s the point of keeping all those dusty old planes, spacecraft, and machines when they could be recycled into toasters or something? (That actually happened to the vast majority of those majestic World War II bombers I love so much after they came home; the reason there’s only one airworthy B-24 Liberator left in the entire world isn’t because they were all shot down.) Isn’t it enough sometimes to simply do a thing because it’s neat, or because we want to? Isn’t it worth saving pieces of history simply because they’re interesting, or because they were part of something big? I don’t know… maybe it’s not. Maybe I’m weird. I’ve been called worse. But I know that I personally derive great value from being face to face with artifacts like this. It helps me establish a connection with the past. It makes events from the past feel real to me. And maybe that’s what kids these days — people in general — really need. To know that once this country reached for the stars and tried to do big things, and we succeeded. It wasn’t a hoax. It wasn’t boring. It was fire and ice and drama and risk and adventure and exploration. And all of that is still there for the taking, if we have the will to try for it again. Don’t tell me we can’t go back to the Moon, or on to Mars. Don’t tell me we can’t find better sources of energy, or figure out how to adapt to climate change (sorry, I don’t believe we can undo that one… it’s coming, and we’d better figure out how to live with it), or even find a way to make universal healthcare work. Once upon a time, we believed as a nation we could do anything we set our minds to. And who knows, maybe some kid might someday see these battered old relics, these formerly burning hearts of a spaceship that went to the frickin’ Moon, and believe that again, and find a way to solve those problems. It’s possible.

In any event, it’s Jeff Bezos’ money. Better he do something like this than stuff it all in some bank in the Caymans, or buy a sixth mansion or another Lambourghini or some damn extravagance like that. At least he’s pouring it into something that excites him and that he believes in. I believe in it, too.

If you’d like to read more about the F1 engines, NASA has an official statement here.

And on a somewhat related topic — okay, it’s not all that related, but it is about space stuff — The Atlantic has posted a pretty interesting interview with Eric Anderson, the co-founder of Planetary Resources. He talks about asteroid mining and settling Mars, and reasons why people might do both, and reasons why he thinks both are inevitable. And going to happen relatively soon, like soon enough that this fortysomething space nerd might actually live to see it. He makes some pretty heady predictions about the human future in space. People have been doing that my whole life, of course, but I really want to believe something might come of it this time. Guys like Anderson, and Bezos, and Elon Musk of SpaceX are pretty convincing. And I enjoy getting excited about this stuff again… not much else really seems to do that trick for me anymore…

After writing the other day about Dennis Tito’s audacious proposal to send a man and a woman on a Martian fly-by in the year 2018, I’ve become somewhat obsessed with the idea. I think it’s the crystal-clear deadline that really sparks my enthusiasm. Lots of people and organizations talk about sending humans to Mars… someday. Twenty or thirty years from now. It seems like it’s always 20 years out, no matter how much time passes. But much like JFK’s famous Moon speech called for a definite timeframe to make the dream happen, Tito — and more importantly that immutable launch window for the fastest free-return trajectory — has drawn a distinct line in the sand: we go now, or not at all. And the fact that the line is only five years away cranks up the excitement levels. I’d love not to be in a nursing home when human eyes get that near to another planet for the first time.

I’ll tell you how enthused I am about this “Mission for America,” as Tito refers to it: I actually downloaded and read the feasibility study put together by the Inspiration Mars Foundation. For fun. Now, my field of expertise is obviously not anything that remotely resembles engineering, but I am a pretty big space nerd with a good feel for how a lot of this hardware works, and the study was obviously written with the non-rocket scientist in mind, so while certain tables and mathematical chatter flew right over my head, I understood the overall gist of it. And while the study’s authors concede that this was only a preliminary examination, and there are a lot of factors that need to be looked at much more rigorously before such a mission can proceed, the findings are convincing. We could do this. It’d push our current technology right up to the limit, and there’s no question it would be tremendously risky. (For instance, one thing the feasibility study brings up that I’ve never really thought about is is the matter of re-entry. They’re not all the same, you see, and the  planned trajectory for this Mars flight would bring the ship back into Earth’s atmosphere at far greater speeds than any other manned spacecraft has ever reached during re-entry, so the astronauts would experience very high g-loads — after a year-and-a-half of weightlessness, remember — and the heatshield would need to be very beefy. But this isn’t an insurmountable problem, just one that needs very careful planning.) Nevertheless, the study’s authors conclude that the mission is possible, and possible within the timeframe we have available. Using existing, state-of-the-art technology — nothing exotic that has to be designed and built from scratch, but things that are available now, or will be very shortly — we really could send a couple spinning around the backside of fracking Mars and bring them home again.

I’m going to go on the record right now and declare that I think we should do it. Or at least attempt it. And not just because I’m an aging child of the 1970s who grew up on Star Trek and Space: 1999 and legends of  the Apollo program and all the other space-related stuff of that era, and who still yearns to see some part of all that come to fruition (although there is, of course, more than a little truth in that accusation). I think we should try it because I believe this country needs something like this, some crazy, exciting dream that’s bigger than partisan politics, bigger than sports or entertainment media, something that will bring us together and give us all a shot of national pride and something to think about other than how shitty everything has become. It’s been decades since we had that sort of shared cultural experience. And things are so very bad right now. The only other time this country has been so at odds with itself, so divided into tribes that are so completely wary of every thing the other side thinks, says, and does, was on the eve of the Civil War. But a big symbolic “first” — especially one that’s not paid for by taxes the people of this nation no longer want to pay — carried out under the American flag might be just the thing to bring us all together again, at least for a little while.

Of course, the naysayers are already coming out of the woodwork, shouting that Tito is out of his mind, that it’s a scam, that he’ll never get the funding (have I mentioned that this is intended to be an entirely private venture?), or there’s not enough time to put it together, or — most  disheartening of all — that it’s a suicide mission. They’re saying that whatever lucky couple wins the seats aboard the Mars ship will never make back alive. And let’s be honest with ourselves, maybe they won’t. Five hundred days in a tin can going so far out into the void… that’s pretty dangerous. A lot of things could go wrong. But I wonder how many people in Portugal said it was suicide when Columbus announced he was going to sail west toward the very edge of the Earth? Or when some hunter-gatherer on the plains of Africa announced that he — or she, perhaps! — wanted to see what was on the other side of that ridge over there. Look, I’m an old-school Trekkie. I believe, in the immortal words of Captain Kirk, that risk is our business. That it’s worth taking a chance in the name of accomplishing a historic first and pushing back the boundaries of human experience and knowledge just a little bit more.

I have always considered myself an explorer at heart. I believe that that’s the basic nature of the human species, to want to know what’s over the horizon. But we get distracted, especially these days, when there are so many shiny things around us, and so many seemingly insurmountable problems weighing us down. We get caught up in the mundane worries of making of a living and keeping ourselves going on days when it seems like everything in the world wants to grind us into powder. And when that happens, we need an adventure — even if it’s only a vicarious one! — to break us out of our complacent ruts and help us rediscover what we really are. The human species needs to explore… to learn… to just see what’s out there. Robotic proxies can only fill so much of that need. At some point, we’ve got to see it with our own eyes.

I really hope this happens. If Tito asks for public donations, I’ll contribute. And I’ll keep watching for news from the foundation… and I’ll keep my fingers crossed that somehow, against all probability, this actually happens.

(Incidentally, if this venture intrigues you, I recommend this article on how it all came about…)

If you haven’t heard, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft arrived safely at the International Space Station early Sunday morning (8:56 AM Eastern time), marking its third successful flight (and second official cargo run) to the orbiting outpost. The trip was a bit bumpy this time out… following a flawless launch, the Dragon appeared for a time to be in serious trouble. The solar panels that supply electrical power for the vehicle refused to deploy, a problem that was traced back to another problem with pressurizing the craft’s thruster propellant tanks. (Briefly, Dragon needs to make a couple maneuvers before it opens its solar “wings”; no thrusters, no maneuvers, so the onboard computer refused to deploy the solar array.) Engineers at SpaceX figured out and corrected the problem within a few hours, putting the spacecraft behind schedule, but otherwise no harm was done. And really this mishap was a good thing, from a certain point of view: SpaceX has now proven that its people and its ship can confront major malfunctions and still get the job done. This wasn’t an Apollo 13-level disaster, but it was serious enough, and could have jeopardized the mission if the ground crews hadn’t figured it out. So good job, SpaceX!

If you’re interested in reading all the details of the launch and subsequent troubleshooting, Phil Plait (the Bad Astronomy guy) has a detailed play-by-play here. Dragon will remain at the ISS for three weeks, dropping off 2,300 pounds of cargo and bringing home some 3,000 pounds of test results and used equipment.

If that’s not exciting enough for you, here are a couple of other spaceflight tidbits that have caught my eye recently:

• I’m sure everyone remembers the announcement last year that a company called Planetary Resources wants to mine near-Earth asteroids for fun and profit, a scheme that has been widely scorned by skeptics who don’t think it can be done, or don’t think it would be worth the cost. Well, skeptics be damned, there’s now another company throwing its hat into the asteroid-mining ring, a start-up called Deep Space Industries. Granted, neither company has revealed any truly detailed plans (let alone any kind of hardware that’s ready to fly), but the mere fact that people are talking seriously about attempting something that I grew up reading about in sci-fi novels, and that there are now two companies competing to try it… well, I’m excited about the possibilities. Asteroid mining really does seem feasible to me, if not right away, then within a few years, and it’s an offworld activity that has — or could have, anyhow — some genuine practical value beyond high-minded ideas about exploration for its own sake. Hell, that meteorite over Russia a couple weeks ago ought to be proof enough that there are big rocks in the sky all around us, we may as well try to put them to use. God knows we’re rapidly using up everything down here.
• Finally, did you hear that Dennis Tito, the gazillionaire who paid his own way into the history books as the first space tourist back in 2001, has set up a foundation with the aim of sending a man and a woman on a close-approach fly-by of the planet Mars in 2018? That’s when a planetary alignment between Earth and Mars that occurs only twice every 15 years will (theoretically) enable a relatively brief round-trip journey of 501 days. The idea is to send a middle-aged married couple who are beyond child-bearing age — probably, I would guess, because the radiation they’ll be exposed to will make them infertile — on a low-fuel “free return” course that will take them within 100 miles of the Martian surface before slingshoting them back home. A free-return orbit will ensure that their spacecraft makes it back regardless of any malfunction… including a worst-case scenario where the crew doesn’t survive. (Go rewatch Apollo 13 — getting into a free-return was the point of them doing that dramatic thruster burn behind the back side of the Moon.) Can an expedition of this magnitude really happen in only five years? Damned if I know… it certainly seems like a long shot. But a lot of the necessary hardware is already in development, which ought to help. SpaceX is working up a heavy-lift version of its Falcon-9 booster — the same one that has successfully shot Dragon into space four times now, as well as commercial payloads — that is supposed to be capable of sending a craft into deep space, and that should be ready in time. As for a spacecraft, there are several capsule-style vehicles under construction now, including a human-rated version of Dragon, but they’re all pretty damn cozy for such a long trip. I’ve seen an artist’s conception of a Mars craft with a Bigelow inflatable module attached for some expanded living space, but even an arrangement like that will no doubt become pretty claustrophobic after a year and a half. Whatever lucky couple wins the lottery will have their marriage put to the ultimate test, I think. And I have no idea if our current life-support technology is up to the job. What about food supplies for that long a flight? And again, there’s the radiation to contend with, once our intrepid Marsnauts leave Earth’s protective magnetic field. (The Apollo astronauts faced that problem too, but they were only exposed for a few days, not 18 months.) The launch window apparently coincides with a period of low solar activity, and I’ve read that older people would have less risk of developing cancer than younger astronauts (because they don’t have as many years left for it to develop), but still…  a mere five years really doesn’t seem like enough time to prepare for something like this, does it? Nevertheless, I tend to agree with Tito’s thinking that a big, bold proposal to do something no human has ever done before is something worth investigating. If it succeeds — a big if, I grant — but if, imagine what this could do for the pride of a nation that’s been battered pretty badly in the last couple of decades. And just imagine being one of those two people, seeing a whole new planet in person. The first people in all of history to do so. It would be… awesome. In the original, pre-1980s-slang sense of that word. Like the old ad campaign once promised, the human adventure is just beginning…

I’m always saying that this isn’t the future I was promised as a kid, but maybe that future is still on the way. Maybe it just got pushed out a bit, and I’ll still live long enough to see at least some of it come true, even if I won’t be among those making it happen…

The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which took off Sunday evening in the spectacular nighttime launch seen above, successfully docked with the International Space Station first thing this morning. This is the first official cargo run of the dozen SpaceX is contracted to handle for NASA. (The Dragon carried some cargo on that groundbreaking flight a few months ago, but that was still technically just a shakedown cruise; the Dragon is now considered fully operational.) The era of true commercial spaceflight has begun; welcome to the future.

The mission hasn’t been all smooth sailing, though. The first stage of the SpaceX Falcon-9 booster rocket lost one of its engines during the ascent, but despite how it appears in the rather alarming video that’s been floating around, SpaceX insists the engine did not explode. Apparently, there’s some kind of a fairing around the engine that came apart — that’s the debris you can see in the video — and the engine automatically shut down, but continued to transmit data, which it would not have done if it’d gone boom. In any event, the Falcon — like the space shuttle and the Saturn rockets before it — was designed to make it to orbit with a dead engine, and this incident was ample demonstration that the failsafe design works.

The Dragon is scheduled to remain at the station for 18 days before returning to Earth with over 800 pounds of research samples and other material the ISS crew is sending home.

In other SpaceX-related news, the company recently fired up its “Grasshopper” testbed, essentially just a rocket motor attached to a set of spindly landing legs, and successfully hovered it for about three seconds. That doesn’t sound very impressive, I know, but the company’s ultimate goal is to someday have its Falcon boosters and possibly the Dragon capsules themselves return to their launch site and land vertically, on their tails and under power, just like the silver-winged rocketships in all those old 1950s sci-fi flicks. The Falcons are currently one-use-only disposables, and the Dragons have to be laboriously recovered at sea; bringing them home in this fashion would cut expenses considerably, and make the Falcon/Dragon combination into something much closer to a truly reusable spacecraft than the shuttle ever was (as much as it pains me to say that). And, also… 1950s-style rocketships! How cool would that be? Needless to say, I’ll be watching this Grasshopper thing with great interest…

Space shuttle Endeavour was lifted onto the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft this afternoon for her upcoming ride from Florida to California… the last time any of the surviving shuttles are likely going to be moved in this fashion. The last time we’ll ever see this ungainly piggyback configuration. I find myself wondering what’s going to become of the two SCAs. It seems to me that at least one of them ought to be preserved as well — as far as I know, they are unique in aerospace history; I don’t know of any other aircraft that have carried another craft of nearly equal size on its back like this — but I haven’t heard if there any such plans.

Speaking of plans, Endeavour‘s new home, the California Science Center is Los Angeles, has extremely ambitious ones for displaying its new acquisition. The Center intends to mount Endeavour as if she were on the launch pad, standing vertically, attached to a pair of empty solid-rocket boosters and an external fuel tank that will be supplied by NASA at a later date. In other words, the CSC, unlike all the other museums that simply have an orbiter sitting in a hanger, wants to display a complete shuttle stack. And I thought Kennedy Space Center’s “in-flight” display plans sounded cool! I have no idea how soon this vision might come to reality (assuming it ever does), but I hope it happens soon.

The youngest of the space shuttles is scheduled to depart from Kennedy on Monday, September 17, and take three days transiting the country (she’ll be overflying seven states and eight NASA facilities, essentially making a farewell tour). Endeavour will land at LAX and spend a couple weeks getting ready for her “road trip,” then be placed on an oversized flat-bed trailer and towed 12 miles along LA city streets in what’s being called “the mother of all parades,” finally reaching her new home in Exposition Park on October 13. The public will be able to call on her beginning October 30.

Photo credit: NASA Kennedy Space Center’s Twitter feed.

I thought I’d round up a few of the things I’ve been seeing about the late Neil Armstrong that have struck me as interesting or poignant.

First, I liked the sentiments expressed in the statement issued by his family:

While we mourn the loss of a very good man, we also celebrate his remarkable life and hope that it serves as an example to young people around the world to work hard to make their dreams come true, to be willing to explore and push the limits, and to selflessly serve a cause greater than themselves.

 

For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.

The last thought was immediately and predictably picked up by the cool kids with their Twitterings and turned into a trending hashtag: #WinkAtTheMoon. As these things ought, I suppose.

Next up, Armstrong’s fellow moonwalker, Buzz Aldrin, who sounds to me like he’s genuinely hurting right now:

I had truly hoped that on July 20th, 2019, Neil, Mike [Collins] and I would be standing together to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of our moon landing, as we also anticipated the continued expansion of humanity into space, that our small mission helped make possible. Regrettably, this is not to be. Neil will most certainly be there with us in spirit.

 

On behalf of the Aldrin family, we extend our deepest condolences to Carol and the entire Armstrong family. I will miss my friend Neil as I know our fellow citizens and people around world will miss this foremost aviation and space pioneer.

 

May he Rest in Peace, and may his vision for our human destiny in space be his legacy.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to have shared an experience like what Armstrong and Aldrin shared — being the first two human beings to walk on the moon — and then decades later to wake up one morning and have to face life without the other one. I don’t know if Buzz and Neil ever got together for barbecues, or even really spoke at all, but surely they must have had some kind of bond that’s now broken. How lost must Aldrin be feeling right now.

Actor, writer, Star Trek alum and Internet sensation Wil Wheaton said this:

I met Neil Armstrong once, at a dinner to honor Jimmy Doohan in the early 2000s.

 

He was not much taller than me, but he was a giant of a man. He was as kind as he was intimidating.

Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer:

We have had our missteps since that one small step, and we can argue about the directions we are or should be taking. But given what we’ve done, and what we are capable of, I have the spark of hope that the future will look back at July 1969 and recognize it for what it was: the dawn of a new era. The end of homo sapiens terrestrialis and the birth of homo sapiens cosmos.

 

Neil Armstrong was the human who literally stood at that dividing line.

 

And I wonder… will there someday be a holiday in his honor? In my mind’s eye I can see people lining the streets, watching parades, talking about that day, smiling and laughing… and all the while, through a quartz window in the dome, the crescent Earth will be hanging in the black sky above them.

I really like that image, and the idea of a holiday in Armstrong’s honor. As I recall, I proposed something similar a few years ago.

The novelist Armistead Maupin, best known for the delightful Tales of the City series, posted a heartwarming anecdote on his Facebook page:

I met this nice man around a campfire last year in Santa Fe. As the moon rose in the sky, he talked, with extraordinary modesty, about landing on it. Later, when I introduced Chris to him as my husband, he smiled as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world. It occurred to me that there’s been more than one ‘giant leap for mankind’ since 1969.

Maupin is gay, if you didn’t know.

Speaking of Facebook, for all its annoying tics and general superficiality, it can provide opportunities for interesting encounters that we might not otherwise have. Here’s an exchange I had Saturday night with the lovely B-movie actress (and recent cancer survivor) Jewel Shepard:

Jewel: A moon walker has died. I met him once when I was in the 6th grade. He looked so ordinary, I thought to myself, this couldn’t have been a man who actually walked! on the moon. Later in life, I have come to realize there are many “ordinary” folks who have done extraordinary things. He was just one of my childhood I will never forget.

 

Me: Great thoughts, Jewel. I envy you for having the opportunity to meet him. I wish I had…

 

Jewel: @Jason yes, I was lucky — but what I learned most from that day and those that followed is this: There are a lot of folks who have achieved exactly what they wanted by following through on a dream. It’s when one doesn’t see past their current station in life is where the dream dies. If one has the desire and applies themselves in little ways towards that goal… a form of that goal does come true. That is what I took away from that day. I was in a foster home. I was alone… and yet, I thought I could just “make it” in movies. Okay, maybe not at the level I had dreamt — but I did and am doing stuff. What Mr. Armstrong allowed me to see for that moment in my life was a person can do something that is both magical and meaningful if one puts heart and thought and never takes their eye off the goal. Direction is what he taught me that day. After all the questions asked like, “Can you breathe on the moon” were answered, I was left with excitement in all things were possible no matter how improbable.

I can’t claim that Jewel Shepard and I are anything resembling actual friends, but we’ve talked in this fashion a couple of times. I like her. She’s a feisty, funny, smart, tough lady. And what she was saying about inspiration and dreams struck a chord for me, as that’s something that’s been on my mind lately. But that’s another blog entry.

Two more items… one is a real treat, a complete, hour-long interview Armstrong granted within the past couple of years (I’m not sure of the exact date, but it looks pretty recent) to an Australian trade group for CPAs, of all things. I haven’t had time to watch the complete thing yet, but in the first two segments, at least, Neil comes across as relaxed, friendly, self-confident but also self-effacing, and full of great stories. In short, a confirmation of everything everyone who ever met him has been saying about him the past couple days. If he had any reticence about being interviewed, it’s not on display here.

And finally, John Scalzi, as he so often does, wrote a blog entry I wish I could claim as my own, comparing the future we used to imagine would flow from Armstrong and Aldrin’s feat to the future we in fact ended up with:

We can still go back to the moon, of course. We can still go and build and stay and use the moon as our first stepping stone to other worlds. Anything is possible. But for me Armstrong’s death forever closes the door on a certain possible path the we could have taken, the one where that first small step and giant leap was not essentially taken in isolation, but was followed by another step and another leap, followed by another, and so on, one right after another, without pause and without interruption. Even when or if we return to the moon, we will never live in Neil Armstrong’s future.

 

I wonder how Armstrong himself felt about that. He lived down the road a piece from me; people I know had the honor of meeting him and described him, in so many words, as one of the best of men. Back here on Earth he did not seem to go out of his way to call attention to himself, and while he encouraged people to keep alive the spirit of exploration and service that he exemplified, it doesn’t seem that he spent a lot of time beating a drum in public. For all that, I read that when he was 80, he volunteered to be the commander of a mission to Mars, should anyone want him for the job. I would guess he wanted to live in Neil Armstrong’s future, too. I’m sorry for him he didn’t get to.

Amen, John.