It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like a Spaceport

Spacecoast, Florida



So They've got two aging shuttles lined up on the pad. The next launch is scheduled for October 10 at 12:43 AM...I may take the old Ford van and a cooler and sleep on the Banana River to be there for the launch.

They will be upgrading the Hubble telescope by a factor of 10 to 70...They have already looked back 13 billion years and concluded that the universe is expanding and that the rate of expansion is accelerating for reasons that we can't begin to understand.

Horatio:
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

Hamlet:
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

Mrs. Phred finds me staring at the ceiling and asks if there is a problem. I tell her that my heros (Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, Chuck Yeager, Scott Crossfield and other giants) are all dead or over 80. I tell her that the shuttle crew were having their diapers changed when I was flying missions...

Mrs Phred is immediately thoughtful ...she starts in about how life goes by in an eye blink...I realize that you should never ever scream "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!" to the women and children...or compare human lifespans to geologic time...

I tell her that there will be a tunnel and a bright light at the end and all her friends and relatives will gather to welcome her...she likes that so I suggest that she might consider being a Muslim and claim her 72 nubile young male virgins at the end...

Anyway...it's crappy that the real deal guys are either very old or dead...