We'll take this planet, shake it round, and turn it upside down

[austin_dern]

During the talk on how he got into space, naturally, Greg Olsen was asked how he had the twenty million dollars to spare. He explained it was because the company he founded, and that he sold the company out at just the right point in the dot-com boom to make more money than a person can spend even when he's buying vacations to the International Space Station. Olsen went on to mention that several of the people from the company were attending the talk, including my father. Mere seconds after the audience turned as a group to look at me and my father, my father leaned over to me and asked, ``Did I hear him mention me by name?'' Yes.

He also passed around the obvious piece of real space gear, a pair of his gloves, and by the logic of the room's design they ended up with me and my father with nobody to pass them on to, so I spent the last half-hour or so of the talk with a space glove resting on my thigh. I may even have got a good photograph of it.

At the reception, several people came up to me or to my father to learn a bit more about what we did with Olsen. The cynical might suppose they were curious to know if we might have a spare twenty millions of dollars, although my father used it as a chance to pump his idle-for-five-years-now consulting business and handed out many business cards I'd created and printed for him that morning. They're not anything special, but I worked a splash of color into them, so they're plain but not boring.

My father and I were the only ones I caught asking Olsen non-space-related questions at the reception, and I watched him ably maintain a straight face as a couple space fanboys started talking about how the Chinese and Indians were planning to go the Moon and steal the Helium-3 for, no doubt, nefarious purposes and it was a Failure of Will on the part of the United States that we were only now getting around to building capsules again although the space shuttle does let you do things that Apollo On Steroids won't. It was almost as if sci.space.history newsgroup participants were to exist in real life. Olsen very gently pointed out that the infinite economic wealth of Helium-3 or minerals from asteroids or whatnot really needed to be better established before great sums were invested in harvesting them, and that political considerations must be important parts of very expensive government-funded programs, and made a graceful exit.

Trivia: On 22 April 1945 Berlin's telegraph office closed, for the first time in its 100-year history. Its last message was from Tokyo, reading, ``GOOD LUCK TO YOU ALL.'' Source: The Last Battle, Cornelius Ryan.

Currently Reading: Randomness, Deborah J Bennett.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

my father leaned over to me and asked, ``Did I hear him mention me by name?''

The smart-alecky answer would have been, "No, I think he was talking about me." But that's less appropriate for mid-talk then a nod and a yes.

Sounds like a very nice time at his presentation/talk/etc.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It would have been, yes, but it would have involved far too much explanation. I know the jokes I can get away with successfully.

It was a good talk, though.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I spent the last half-hour or so of the talk with a space glove resting on my thigh

Neat.

This is a wide tangent, but I'm reminded of how sad it is that the Michigan Space and Science Center closed. I have fond memories of field trips there in grade school, and being shown a real space suit with the water cooling system inside it, and best of all, buying astronaut ice cream from the gift shop. The MSSC was part of Jackson Community College and closed a few years ago due to lack of funding. This is no doubt related to the fact that the good people of Jackson have not seen fit to pass a millage increase for JCC in something like ten years. When I taught a class there, I was paid $1350, the least I've ever been paid for a course by far (the next least was something like $2200 at Lansing CC). It was an awful experience for such little compensation and so I only ever taught there once -- as I suspect is the case for most people who teach there, meaning that the quality of instruction is no doubt quite low. The rationale for having a space museum attached to JCC is that there is an astronaut, James McDivitt, who is an alumnus of JCC.

Anyway, the MSSC had various artifacts including an actual landing capsule. All of the stuff got moved to a museum in Kalamazoo when it closed, except -- sadly -- the landing capsule, which got moved to a museum somewhere down south (Texas, I think). Very sad.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Well, the Texas are probably happy about it, and the Kalamazeese. But I do understand that it's not around where you want it to be, so aww.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I suppose I've been a bit spoiled. The National Air and Space Museum is at least theoretically just a weekend trip away, and while that's more than just somewhere else in the county it's also a lot to take in.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

As it happens there's a James McDivitt Elementary School in my old home town. He was the commander for Gemini IV, when the United States had its first spacewalk, and for Apollo IX, when the United States had the first spacewalk by Soviet standards. (The Gemini program spacewalks had life support provided by a hose connected to the spacecraft; the Soviets -- not unreasonably -- held that it wasn't a spacewalk unless the spacesuit was providing the life support.)

It's aggravating that the college hasn't got the funding to do useful things like pay instructors a remotely plausible salary, or fine side lines like the Space and Science Center. All sorts of gadgets and simulators and such are nice, but an actual piece of flown spaceship has a particular magic. At the Goddard Space Flight Center's visitor's museum they had the Gemini XII capsule, and you can practically crawl all over it, which really brings things close to you.