{"id":1723,"date":"2009-05-28T11:48:54","date_gmt":"2009-05-28T18:48:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/?p=1723"},"modified":"2009-05-28T11:48:54","modified_gmt":"2009-05-28T18:48:54","slug":"why-space-makes-me-cry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/28\/why-space-makes-me-cry\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Space Makes Me Cry"},"content":{"rendered":"

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. –JFK<\/em><\/p>\n

I get all choked up over space. I don’t mean the imaginary space you see on TV and in Star Trek (which I am still processing, please don’t make me post spoilers), I mean SPACE, the stuff out there. The place where we’re all floating like a giant blue marble in a sea of inky black, the whole thing punctuated with twinkly lights and mystery. Astronauts? They blow my mind. I can not believe that these superhumans strap themselves in tiny tin cans to giant explosive rockets and go off to see what’s out there because they can. It. Kills. Me.<\/p>\n

So you can imagine that I was kind of an emotional mess at the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 I could not believe the tiny capsules, the fragile jumpsuits with bubble helmets, the film footage and newspaper headlines and odd little artifacts and replicas of the stuff that makes up space exploration. Peering into the tiny window on a replicated space travel module freaked me right out, I tried to imagine what it’s like to be in there untethered by the strings of gravity. High above in the vaulted ceilings of the Space Museum, there’s a space suit tied by an umbillical cord to the little ship, a human figure floating in midair, defying gravity and good sense and planetary existence. I stood there, gaping upward, in the middle of that cavernous space, and tried to imagine what it must be like to anchor your cables and step outside into the vast unknowable expanse of space. Then I watched JFK’s speech and I had to go sit down for a while.<\/p>\n

Think about it, the unbelievable miracle of space travel. Looking at all those switches and wires and analog meters made me crazy — the technology I use to write this far advances anything those astronauts had and yet, they went to SPACE and came back. I just sit around writing, thinking it’s a big deal if I can write to you from Hawaii or Vietnam. Imagine the unshakeable faith those travelers had in their journey, they knew that they would either come home or die trying, and sometimes, they didn’t get far off the ground before they did exactly that — die trying, I mean. The spirit of adventure in those humans, oh, I’m just overwhelmed by it. How could I not be?<\/p>\n

It’s not a perfect museum, the gaping space feels too big, oddly, and I didn’t feel like I got the information I wanted about the stuff I was looking at. But I was completely, utterly awed by the idea of space travel all over again. If that’s the museum’s goal, well, it’s a complete success. Mission accomplished, I guess.<\/p>\n

In case you’ve not seen it, here’s the “We Choose to Go to the Moon” speech. The clip is about 20 minutes; it’s worth it. <\/p>\n

<\/param><\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

The Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum<\/a> is just outside of McMinnville Oregon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … <\/p>\n


…read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-seattle","masonry-post","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1723"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1724,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723\/revisions\/1724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}