"Copy that. Please give details."
"We're right out of brain power. We're having trouble computing distances, time and size."
"We copy. You're having trouble imagining it all?"
"Affirmative. We're not sure our brains can stretch that far."
"Copy that and continue. Happens to everyone."
Today, we allowed ourselves to get swept away by the majesty of it all. The numbers which run into trillion billions, the distances which actually seem more like forever. At the end of the last IMAX film on the Hubble Telescope, we simply gave up trying to add up the number of zeros and just gawped at the pretty pictures. Stuff like this...
Not that comedy is ever far away from the sublime. Take Art Meraz, introduced as 'a real life rocket scientist!' (never forget the exclamation mark).
This was a chap from the United Launch Alliance, a commercial organisation which is throwing into orbit a GPS system for the US Air Force.. He came, he told us, to spread the word about the commercial organisations now going into space. His company will be involved in the exploration of Pluto.
Sadly, whatever skills Art may have as a launch operations avionics engineer, he could certainly use some coaching on presentation skills. He shows the extreme danger of taking a passion and then making a living from it - it becomes beset with administration, budgets and the humdrum. Certainly, his monotone delivery soon scattered his audience, and us with it.
But we played about today, attempting to land Curiosity-like crafts on Mars without crashing (done by Karen at the third attempt - a bit like her driving test), listening in to other people's tours, and having lunch with an astronaut - or rather listening to an astronaut after lunch. It was a good lunch, and a good presentation from Jack Lousma, one of the few pilots to have flown SkyLab and the Space Shuttle missions. He had just the right amount of self-deprecation with a lot of stunning footage.
Karen - keen as ever - asked a question about how you get to go on multiple flights and Jack's response was - "Don't screw up."
At the end of the session, when people were scrabbling to get photos taken with Jack, we headed for Gratia Kay, his wife of 47 years. When asked if she ever wished her husband had had another job, she said "Oh no. It was great that he did what he wanted to - the only thing I ever cared about was when he might not get to do it all." We thought she was pretty cool.
Tonight we ate dinner at the splendid Dixie Crossroads, a seafood place in Titusville. Titusville, be assured, hasn't much to recommend it, although we did stop off at possibly the prettiest and therefore most photographed place - Space View Park.
Our dinner was wonderful, and we thought it worth sharing some of the unexpected pleasures of the place with you. So, who would have thought a place which looked like this....
....could have toilets like this.
No comments:
Post a Comment