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A Life Entangled with NASA
Back to the Army again, sergeant,
Back to the Army again.
Out o’ the cold an’ the rain, sergeant,
Out o’ the cold an’ the rain.
‘Oo’s there?
A man that’s too good to be lost you,
A man that is ‘andled an’ made –
A man that will pay what ‘e cost you
In learnin’ the others their trade – parade!
You’re droppin’ the pick o’ the Army
Because you don’t ‘elp ’em remain,
But drives ’em to cheat to get out o’ the street
An’ back to the Army again!
Twenty years ago Wednesday morning, I sat on a hilltop overlooking the northern part of the firing range at Vandenburg Air Force Base. In a pre-internet era for monitoring the umbilical data from what was going to be the first of three climate-research satellites, my go/no duties were completed around 6 a.m. It was just in time to head out of the “blockhouse” (no they don’t really exist anymore) to watch sunrise wash over the SLC-3 launch pad.
In the 1960s there was no hotter job in Texas than that of astronaut. If you were one of that elite crew, you were conquering space, getting there by riding a column of fire. With a job that hot, you needed to cool down after the workday was over. Fortunately, the astronauts were based in Houston and did most of their work there. They could take advantage of a Texas tradition: the ice house.
The Mars Society is calling on all Americans to urge their members of Congress to support the nomination of 
I should write a technical post on the emerging post-Shuttle age of manned space flight, but I’ll leave that for Rand Simberg, James Gawron(?), anonymous, and the others who are more knowledgeable. Instead, I’m going to bring up a NASA language peeve: The tendency to misrepresent the meaning of “man” and “manned.”
