On Tuesday, November 15, 2011, NASA opened up to applications for Astronaut Candidates. Their website http://astronauts.nasa.gov/ details the Astronaut selection process. Their PDF goes into details on the qualifications. Some are very do-able for most American adults, others put the dream of being an Astronaut just out of reach.
To see these things clearly defined have allowed me to step up to the challenge.
The "key requirements" of the job, as outlined on the application are very easy for me:
-Position subject to a pre-employment background check. I passed a background check for Army Counterintelligence, so I think I'm okay.
-This is a drug-testing designated position. Again, totally okay on that. I don't do drugs and I won't do drugs because it so severely limits many wonderful opportunities in life.
- Frequent travel may be required. Awesome. Yes. I sure hope so!
- Selectee must pass a pre-employment medical examination. Not knowing what they're looking for, this one is the only thing that has me nibbling my nails. I know I can pass an FAA exam, but I've heard many anecdotes on conditions that failed Candidates out of the early low-earth orbit programs.
So, it sounds like I could be a pretty okay candidate for it. I was pretty stoked and ready to apply but I'm rather sure that impulsiveness is a quality not desired in people controlling billions of dollars hurtling through space and thousands of miles an hour. I read on and checked out the rest of the qualifications. This is where I realised that I am not ready for becoming an Astronaut. Though I had gone on another path in life, I could clearly see that it was not too late to make my dream career a reality.
Having the path to becoming an Astronaut laid out, I know exactly what I need to do.
1. Bachelor's degree from an accredited institution in engineering, biological science, physical science, or mathematics. Quality of academic preparation is important. Ooohhh well then. First, I'm not done with my degree for another few years - and it's not in the sciences. My intent is to get a Masters in Photographic Conservation in Collections Management from Ryerson University and take that to the Air and Space Museum. In any restorative or preserving process, however, there is a strong element of chemistry. Part of the appeal to it IS the science behind the process. So, as I finish getting my Bachelors in Fine Arts I will tack on what looks to be an extra year for a dual major in Chemistry. It's possible I will have an extra 2 years because "quality of academic preparation" is important. I'm rather poor in the maths department, so I will need to go slow. This semester, I started by taking MATH015: Prealgebra and Introductory Algebra. It's been 15 years since I've taken a class in calculations and though I use arithmetic every day, I don't think of it. The semester has just started but once things get in swing, I'm going to go to the science chair and talk about getting on the path I need. I know there's many STEM grants available - especially to women - so I shouldn't be looking at much more of a financial burden.
2. Degree followed by at least 3 years of related, progressively responsible, professional experience OR at least 1,000 hours pilot-in-command time in jet aircraft. An advanced degree is desirable and may be substituted for experience as follows: master's degree = 1 year of experience, doctoral degree = 3 years of experience. Teaching experience, including experience at the K - 12 levels, is considered to be qualifying experience for the Astronaut Candidate position; therefore, educators are encouraged to apply. Not really knowing how my life's path will wind, this is a difficult requirement to determine. Jokes can be made about it, but I'd really like to explore the science of cleaning things. My professional experience in conservation sciences IS the science of cleaning things, but I don't think that's exactly what NASA is looking for. I thought that I'd like to keep the option of teaching open, but given the problems my local school corporations have been having I kinda put that idea aside. I may keep it open. This is something I believe I'll seek some guidance on. Astronaut Rex Walheim has made a video about the hiring process. Many current and former Astronauts seem dedicated to the furthering of the field, so I'm sure that if I commit myself to the process I will have resources available to me.
Though, with the rate I'm going these days, I might end up having those jet flight hours before I'm out of school.
3. Ability to pass the NASA long-duration space flight physical, which includes the following specific requirements:
Distant and near visual acuity: Must be correctable to 20/20, each eye It's been a long time since I've had an eye test, but I've always tested normally. I'm pretty lucky, with as tragically nerdy as I am, that I've never needed glasses.
The refractive surgical procedures of the eye, PRK and LASIK, are allowed, providing at least 1 year has passed since the date of the procedure with no permanent adverse after effects. For those applicants under final consideration, an operative report on the surgical procedure will be requested. Should I need correction, I would probably seek out a procedure like this anyway. I don't think I'd enjoy wearing gasses and I have a weird thing about eyes so daily touching of my eyes is not an option. Lord help me if I ever get something in there.
Blood pressure not to exceed 140/90 measured in a sitting position I've never really paid too much attention to my blood pressure before but I've been having a bit of a hormone problem that gives me odd blood pressures. Thankfully, it's on the low side. For example, when admitted to the ER last summer with intense abdominal pain (again tied to my hormone issue), my horribly stressed out blood pressure was 142/94 but after pain medicine it lowered to 121/83. I don't know what that all means. Honestly, I need to sort out this whole endocrine thing before I really commit myself to deep space travel anyway. None of the causes that doctors have supposed are FAA disqualifying, so we'll see.
Standing height between 62 and 75 inches. I am 64.75 inches, so go me.
Other things it seems they'll be looking for is skills in Russian language, physical fitness, and aeronautics abilities. I started flight training several years ago but had to stop when I moved away from Chicago and it got more expensive (figure THAT one out). I recently moved a bike ride away from a mid-sized airport where it's only $110/hour for flight training. Totally doable. I'll need to sell a lot of art to fund it, but luckily I'm in a really artsy place right now. Thankfully, I'm also very near a university with an awesome Russian language program. I had started learning, again, while in Chicago. I worked with a bunch of Russian and Ukrainian gals, so it just kind of rubbed off on me. When immersed, Russian is actually a rather easy language to learn. The language, as it exists today as spoken in the United States, has many loanwords from English. Astronauts on the ISS say they speak "Runglish", a mix of Russian and English. I just worry that "tourist Russian" won't be a lot of use while packed in a capsule for hours on end. Probably not a lot of need to ask for the bathroom or refusal of fish going on in a Soyuz.
I would like to know so much more about past Astronaut Candidates. These qualifications seem so simple and easy, how could they ever weed through the millions of applications they get? I know I must dedicate myself to absolute mastery of the necessary skills if I am going to get through the first round - next time around. I'm clearly not ready for NASA right now.
One woman's quest to make that small step.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Friday, December 16, 2011
Radio Silence
Just finished finals (killed them) and am in the middle of a move to a whole new city.
Will return next week with ramblings on the problems with becoming an astronaut. No, my being absolutely insane isn't a factor. ;)
Will return next week with ramblings on the problems with becoming an astronaut. No, my being absolutely insane isn't a factor. ;)
Friday, December 2, 2011
Why the Moon Now?
It seems the most driven of people lay their path from a young age. It seems every biography of a successful person (as defined by modern US society, anyway) tells a tale of pre-adolescent brilliance that paved the way for the man - comeon, it's almost always a man - we know today. You rarely hear stories of, "Johnny Doe who, at the tender age of 25, tossed aside his formal violin training to begin a new life as the world's leading investment broker". No, it's Johnny Doe the Third, son of Jonathan Doe the CEO of Conglomovest who, after taking a top spot in Costington's Academy for Fine Young Men's graduating class went on to complete his University studies in record time mostly due to his ability to study uninterupted by the priorities of a job and to ease his mind by summering on the family yacht.
Does this sound like it's about to be a class structure rant? Perhaps.
Sadly, in America, education breeds success and the best of education is offered to the people who can pay for it.
"But what about scholarships? Grants?"
Let's take the case of Little Sally Moonshot. Miss Moonshot had all her credits for graduation at the end of her Junior year and left high school with a 3.82 GPA (she had to take an F in Latin after walking out because the teacher called her "a hussy"). The only scholarship available, however, was through the local Redenbacher Popcorn farm - which she was sadly disqualified for, being a direct relative of the company's founder and all.
Undeterred, she moved in to her University dorm 2 weeks after completing high school and became a member of the National Honour Society before something hit the breaks for her. Her savings were running out and there were no jobs to be had in that tiny, close knit, old money town. She wasn't "a towney" and there was nothing available for "a gowney". Less than a year away from graduation she had to drop out. By the time federal regulations allowed her to qualify for grants, 5 years later, the industry had changed so much that only her core classes were worth anything.
So why, without that early success story, would Little Sally Moonshot suddenly think she is going to become the next great American story?
Because the success story starts even earlier...
From Day One I've been making myself ready for space exploration.
You know those people who can tell you where they were or what they were doing the first time they heard The Beatles (or, these days, Nickleback? I don't know.)? I'm not one of them. I heard The Beatles in the womb. I heard The Beatles in the crib. I knew the words to Yellow Submarine before I knew Itsy Bitsy Spider.
Same thing with aeronautics.
My mother took me to my first plane - a Boeing Stearman - when she was pregnant with me. I don't know if she konked my head getting in to the cockpit or what, but I was born with a love of flying. There were model planes above my crib then bed. I went with my dad to airshows and rode on his shoulders as aerobats looped overhead. Old war heroes held my hand as they led me around the museum in Dayton, easily lifting me for a view into the machines that few ever got. Docents slyly smiled as I got tiny, greasy handprints on polished aluminum (but as an adult, I know those smiles concealed the desire to strangle me for the work I just ruined).
The manned shuttle and I were born the same year. Within days of each other, actually. It was as if Columbia and I were just sisters in a lineage of geeks.
And just as all sisters take each other for granted, I did not fully understand how important the shuttle program was. Hey, whoopie, time for another launch!
My dad had fond memories of watching the rocket launches of his childhood and he really made sure to catch each of the launches of my early years. Even when I was too young to really remember them, I am told that it was a special event in the house. Either my mom or my dad would always make sure of the time and make sure that I was there in front of the TV.
Then, just like sisters again, something tragic happened to remind me of how precious the other was.
I was really geared up for the 1986 launch of Shuttle Challenger. This is the first launch I'm sure I remember.
I had turned 3 that winter. The first memory I have that I can place to a date is my 3rd birthday party. I got a set of kitchen tools that had cookie cutters - one was a measuring cup with a star cutter that embossed a smiley face on the bottom - and a toy stove that was made of pieces that fit together like a puzzle. When I opened my presents, we were listening to the album Too Old to Rock and Roll by Jethro Tull. I liked the book that came with it. I didn't understand what it all really meant, but I knew that I never wanted to be too old to rock and roll.
I'm sure that I have memories that pre-date that. It's possible I even remember the 1985 launch of Challenger. That morning was special though. There was a teacher going to space. My mom worked at a school. She was a regular gal. Teachers were just regular gals, no different from me. (As an aside, at that age NOBODY was different from me. I was convinced that when I grew up, I could be Mr. T. Not an actor, wrestler, or self-esteem builder, but actually BE Mr. T.).
I remember watching the countdown. Leading up, there had been something like a pre-game show. They showed pre-taped (since everyone was aboard the shuttle already) interviews with all the astronauts - Particularly Christa McAuliffe, since she was the hot news of the mission. The feed cut to her students all wishing her luck. It cut to students in my town, sitting on a rug, "indian-style", looking up at the TV on one of those big metal carts with the shelf for a top-loading VCR. The clock counted down. The engines roared to life. The shuttle blazed in to the sky....
Then there on live TV I watched as, for the first time in my life, 7 people met a very sudden and very tragic end.
I touched the TV screen as if it somehow would help.
It seems, when I see old video of tragic happenings... like Indy 500 wrecks and things like that... the camera cuts away as soon as they realise something went wrong. I don't know if this was the beginning of "you see it here" reporting or if the cameraman was as stunned as I was but nobody turned away. The cloud of vapor, smoke, and remains billowed larger and bits rained down. Unlike when I later saw the collapse of Tower 2, there was no screaming, no "OH THE HUMANITY". It was almost as if that moment had been created for me to see.
Maybe if you watched in school that day, your teacher hurried to turn off the screen. Perhaps you later watched Mr. Rogers talk to you about death. You got to discuss with your friends what you saw and how it made you feel. I've heard stories of children around the cape that day being kept inside because of the dangers of debris and poisons raining down.
Me? I was alone.
My memory of the minutes that followed differ from that of my parents. One thing we can agree on, though, is that I had turned on the TV myself and that I watched the launch myself and that before I walked in to the bedroom and broke the news of what had just happened I made a resolution.
I would become an astronaut and I would carry on what those 7 could not.
My parents were supportive in the mini-NASA I created to fill the void during the downtime to redesign the shuttle's rockets. My dad took me to the hobby shop to pick out Estes model rockets to build. While he shot the breeze, I learned how to race slot cars and actually won packs of engines from time-to-time by beating guys far older than me. I would drink Yoo-Hoo and play Pac Man. Though, as I was so young that nobody thought to discuss strategy, it wouldn't be until I was 22 that I understood the goal of Pac Man.
We lived across the railroad tracks from an Army base. Back in those days, it was as if whatever land you could walk on was yours so we would pick our way across the sticky ties and jumbles of ballast to the an open field at the base and launch our rockets. My favourite was The Wasp. It was about 3.5 inches high - just enough to fit a parachute in - yellow with a black nose cone and 3 black fins. When we weren't building rockets, I would sit on my dad's lap and help him out with balsa models or he would teach me morse code.
I still don't know morse code. Sorry Dad.
By the time we started sending people back in space, I was in school. As expected, I was the only one in my class who could read. I had already been writing my name for several years. I couldn't yet tie my shoes, but that was okay because velcro was totally in fashion then. Oh yeah, and I had been the only student who had seen the Challenger explode. When it came for our time to sit on the rug, indian-style, and watch the launch, I was a bit nervous. Being the only one in class who responded with "AN ASTRONAUT!" (in exactly the tone you'd expect from an all-caps 6 year old) to the "what do you want to be when you grow up?" question, I guess I had been partly to blame for the viewing.
Thankfully, everything went well and the whole space business was back in business. We were gonna launch shuttles to space. We were gonna put satellites, and cameras, and lasers into space. We were gonna keep an eye on those godless commies from space. We were gonna take our trash to space and solve that whole eco problem. And... Oh, and best of all.. WE WERE GONNA LIVE IN SPACE!!!
I was right along for every step of that ride. I excelled in school, winning state mathematics competitions, skipping grades, and being selected for special "high ability" classes. Around 3rd grade, following stepping on a dead Alewife at Tiscornia Park, I started studying biology. For most young girls, this would mean reading a few books from the school library and making a scrapbook about the life cycle of a frog. I think it's pretty apparent that I was not most young girls. For me, studying biology meant going to seminars about DNA (and being the youngest one in there by a good 20 years) and learning human anatomy from my uncle Tom's art books - yes, serious art books not "art books". He was a special effects artist.
I even got a special trip to the Kalamazoo Air Zoo to meet an astronaut. And, would you believe it, I have never been able to remember who it was. I'm sure it was someone from U of M which means that I probably met a guy who's walked on the moon and don't remember which one it is.
Sorry, Guy Who Walked on the Moon.
Then one clear day, almost as clear as the day I made my original declaration, something magical came across my desk. A brochure for Space Camp.
As an avid Double Dare watcher, I knew about Space Camp. This was the pre-internet days, though, so getting information about Space Camp wasn't as easy as going to http://www.spacecamp.com/ or following the ever informative @SpaceCampCur8r on twitter. This brochure was the first time that I really had Space Camp in my hands.
"Mom, can I go to Space Camp?" "Of course!", says the woman in the way that only someone who knows her 9 year old daughter is going to Space Camp with or without her permission would say.
So I had a Tupperware party to raise the money to go to Space Camp.
I do not know what kid in her right mind decides that Tupperware is the way to go. Any normal child would have sold lemonade or something. Heck, I had been top cookie seller in my Girl Scout council 3 years in a row. I could have sold the snot out of some lemonade.
But when your "friends" are all in their late 20's, are astronomers, teahouse owners, and antique collectors, lemonade won't cut it.
I didn't end up making enough for my Space Camp trip, but I did have enough for a very nice set of luggage to take with me when I did go. So I got the luggage. It served me well when, as a consolation for not getting the funds for Space Camp (what I thought was merely a temporary setback), a friend took me and a couple other kids down to Purdue to meet what would someday be our professors. We got a tour of the grounds and saw the thousand person lecture halls and ate lunch at one of the dining centers. It was like we were prospective students - except we weren't yet in junior high.
I came home totally invigorated and focused like a raygun on the prize of spaceflight. I kept kicking ass and taking names in the sciences but under the wing of my uncle and a Ms. Betty Bea Washburne, I also started kicking ass in the arts. I joined the show choir and started tasting a little bit of that show choir fame. I got scholarships for summer art camps where I learned not only the art of Raku but also the construction of "works bombs". While people started catching up to me in the mathematics contests, I was still far ahead in the art contests with my work being shown not only in the special student galleries around town but also in the statehouse and in books. For a national Girl Scouts commemoration, I had been selected among others in my council to record a special version of their song "We Change the World" that was sent to the president. Of the U.S. Yeah, I was that big.
As I came to the end of 4th grade 2 things happened back-to-back that would change my life forever.
I became severely ill and a week of intense fever and dehydration scrambled the hell out of my brain.
My Odyssey of the Mind team took 6th overall at state and 3rd in Drama.
5th grade started pretty normally... for the high-ability core. In some ways it was nice because we pretty much had a free run of our little building. We painted murals on the walls. Class projects involved learning the physics of light through burning patches of the football field and building communication skills through assembling wheelbarrows for the local hardware store. We learned biology from one of the best science teachers in the state (seriously, commendations from the governor and everything) and were dissecting whole pigs before the year was over. I started slipping in my grades, though. Up to that point, I had never had less than an A. Even an A- was cause for concern. These classes were just a challenge to me.
In the end, I chalked it up to having just lost my brother to suicide. Anyone who loses someone dear to them is bound to slip, right?
It was in art camp that summer that I realised how far I had slipped. I just didn't care anymore. Brother Moonshot was only 17 when he killed himself. He had lived a hard life, but had gotten himself cleaned up and on a good path. His death was a complete shock to everyone - including his therapist, whom he had seen just 2 days before.
My last words to him, after a rousing duel in the videogame Road Rash, were "see you later".
I had to start seeing a therapist of my own on a very regular basis after he died. My mom had very spotty employment, so I didn't get the advantage of sitting in a quiet room with a sensitive analyst. I spent an hour in a hard plastic chair at a desk in a florescent lit cube telling my life to a student more interested in taking notes than setting me back on a path. As I told one, "I feel like everything was static and after he died I suddenly tuned in the channel and it was all clear", I began to suspect that the choice for science was thrust upon me by the Lineage of Geeks. I didn't care anymore. From that day on, Sally Moonshot was Sally CelloPaint.
I don't know if it was a self-fulfilling prophecy or what, but my return to school in the fall showed exactly what I expected - 1st Chair cello, Blue Ribbon linocut prints, published poetry.
I still excelled in science - this year, we were learning basic chemistry and physics. All we needed to know was the theories and terminology. No calculations, no formulas. Mathematics was a different story. I had forgotten everything. Even those rote-learned multiplication tables were lost. I had to count on my fingers for addition and subtraction, and when called out on it learned the "dots on the corners" method. "Oh, I just got lazy over the summer", I figured. I didn't eventually catch up. I slipped further and further and further behind.
By the end of the fall semester, I had a D in math.
The next year was the same thing. Rockin' progress in most everything. Went to the County Geography Bee. Did a special program at the Air Zoo. Sang to representatives from the town of Takasaki, Japan.
Failing math.
At least until I transferred schools and everyone taught me how to cheat. I had never cheated on a test or assignment in my life. Now it was the only way I could pull a good enough grade to not get abusive punishment from my stepmother. So I cheated. I cheated my ass off. I copied assignments. I made cribsheets for tests. I even went in to the teacher's gradebook and gave myself better grades. I explained it away by saying "everyone else does it".
I would Godwin the previous paragraph, but why bother. Even though the water's so far under the bridge, it's dolphin piss, I still feel bad. "Everyone else does it" is not an acceptable excuse for any behaviour.
For that, I'm sorry to everyone.
The school lacking anything even closely resembling an art program, I tossed myself back into science. I was living with my dad again. He would take me to work with him over breaks and I was learning circuitry again. We were building radios together. I helped rebuild the engine on the '72 Volkswagon Microbus. I had someone I could talk to about the amazing things we did in Gail Gentry's science class. And, again, I won science contests. Still couldn't do the math behind the workings, but I knew the Scientific Method like I knew my own name.
Still didn't care though. Outside my dad and my best friend Jill, there wasn't really anything in life for me. At school, they thought I was a satan worshiping lesbian and suggested I become an altar server as the cure. In sport, I was a joke that served a volleyball about as well as the Hubble focused. And at home, my stepmother became increasingly hostile until the point came that she kicked my dad and I out of the house. At 14 years old, I was homeless.
And that was the official end of caring until now.
During the final portfolio review for my studio lighting class my instructor, the incredibly talented James Godman, asked me "what are you passionate about?". I started crying because at that moment I could not come up with one thing that truly filled me up. I had possessions beyond compare, the love of many wonderful people, the respect of my peers, and professional prestige usually unheard of at that age. Even with all that, I was empty inside.
I hadn't feel a true spark of excitement for years until May 25, 2008 when WBBM radio, for some reason, broke through the usual programming to announce that Phoenix had landed on the surface of Mars. I was driving my POS '93 Saturn down Algonquin Road. I had just pulled up to a stop light when the announcement was made. I don't know why, but I felt such an elation and relief. This wasn't a manned mission. It wasn't close to the first time we did it. It was just a robot. It was just gonna go and snap some pics and roam around to see what it could see....
But, man, when they announced that Phoenix landed safely I felt like I had met some kind of personal goal.
I honked my horn and yelled "WE'RE ON MARS!!!!!!" I let out a big whoop without regard. The SUV beside me rolled down his window and was all "what?" "We're on Mars!" I told him. "What?" "Mars! We just landed on Mars!!" He turned his attention back to his cellphone, "we just landed on Mars, she says..."
As the light changed, I called out to pedestrians on the street "WE LANDED ON MARS!"
They must have thought I was a crazy lady.
If it was like Sally Moonshot's re-birthday, then Miss Moonshot's christening surely came when wechoosethemoon.org was launched for the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's moon mission.
The site (which should still be accessible but I'm too busy writing to check) featured "real time" mission data from the moment of launch to landing on earth. Wracked with insomnia - but discovering recently that I actually sleep on a really great space schedule - I would tune in at odd hours of the day to find a strange familiar comfort in the mundane checklist chatter.
On July 20, I featured "Moon Makeovers" at work. I cooked an early dinner and took care of all my affairs early so I could settle in and watch the "live" footage on Discovery.
As Armstrong set his foot down on the moon, my eyes leaked.
No disrespect to the promise I had made 23 years prior, but on that day I chose the moon.
So today I begin what I hope is the second-to-last chapter of my moon story.
Effective Tuesday, November 15, 2011 to Friday, January 27, 2012, NASA is accepting applications for the Astronaut Candidate Class of 2013. If you read this far and it's between those dates, you can actually go to http://astronauts.nasa.gov/ and see if you have "The Right Stuff" (ha ha ha).
This is exciting for several reasons. For one, this is pretty much the first Astronaut Candidate Class of my generation. Those of us who are sisters and brothers of Shuttle Columbia are now done with our studies. We're grown up. We have put in the time needed to qualify for the program.
More importantly....
We're gonna do this, folks. NASA's gonna light this candle and we're puttin' our feet on distant lands.
"So, Sally Moonshot," you ask, "you'll let us know when you hear back on your application, right?"
That, my friends, is another story for another day. This old lady's gotta get to bed.
Does this sound like it's about to be a class structure rant? Perhaps.
Sadly, in America, education breeds success and the best of education is offered to the people who can pay for it.
"But what about scholarships? Grants?"
Let's take the case of Little Sally Moonshot. Miss Moonshot had all her credits for graduation at the end of her Junior year and left high school with a 3.82 GPA (she had to take an F in Latin after walking out because the teacher called her "a hussy"). The only scholarship available, however, was through the local Redenbacher Popcorn farm - which she was sadly disqualified for, being a direct relative of the company's founder and all.
Undeterred, she moved in to her University dorm 2 weeks after completing high school and became a member of the National Honour Society before something hit the breaks for her. Her savings were running out and there were no jobs to be had in that tiny, close knit, old money town. She wasn't "a towney" and there was nothing available for "a gowney". Less than a year away from graduation she had to drop out. By the time federal regulations allowed her to qualify for grants, 5 years later, the industry had changed so much that only her core classes were worth anything.
So why, without that early success story, would Little Sally Moonshot suddenly think she is going to become the next great American story?
Because the success story starts even earlier...
From Day One I've been making myself ready for space exploration.
You know those people who can tell you where they were or what they were doing the first time they heard The Beatles (or, these days, Nickleback? I don't know.)? I'm not one of them. I heard The Beatles in the womb. I heard The Beatles in the crib. I knew the words to Yellow Submarine before I knew Itsy Bitsy Spider.
Same thing with aeronautics.
My mother took me to my first plane - a Boeing Stearman - when she was pregnant with me. I don't know if she konked my head getting in to the cockpit or what, but I was born with a love of flying. There were model planes above my crib then bed. I went with my dad to airshows and rode on his shoulders as aerobats looped overhead. Old war heroes held my hand as they led me around the museum in Dayton, easily lifting me for a view into the machines that few ever got. Docents slyly smiled as I got tiny, greasy handprints on polished aluminum (but as an adult, I know those smiles concealed the desire to strangle me for the work I just ruined).
The manned shuttle and I were born the same year. Within days of each other, actually. It was as if Columbia and I were just sisters in a lineage of geeks.
And just as all sisters take each other for granted, I did not fully understand how important the shuttle program was. Hey, whoopie, time for another launch!
My dad had fond memories of watching the rocket launches of his childhood and he really made sure to catch each of the launches of my early years. Even when I was too young to really remember them, I am told that it was a special event in the house. Either my mom or my dad would always make sure of the time and make sure that I was there in front of the TV.
Then, just like sisters again, something tragic happened to remind me of how precious the other was.
I was really geared up for the 1986 launch of Shuttle Challenger. This is the first launch I'm sure I remember.
I had turned 3 that winter. The first memory I have that I can place to a date is my 3rd birthday party. I got a set of kitchen tools that had cookie cutters - one was a measuring cup with a star cutter that embossed a smiley face on the bottom - and a toy stove that was made of pieces that fit together like a puzzle. When I opened my presents, we were listening to the album Too Old to Rock and Roll by Jethro Tull. I liked the book that came with it. I didn't understand what it all really meant, but I knew that I never wanted to be too old to rock and roll.
I'm sure that I have memories that pre-date that. It's possible I even remember the 1985 launch of Challenger. That morning was special though. There was a teacher going to space. My mom worked at a school. She was a regular gal. Teachers were just regular gals, no different from me. (As an aside, at that age NOBODY was different from me. I was convinced that when I grew up, I could be Mr. T. Not an actor, wrestler, or self-esteem builder, but actually BE Mr. T.).
I remember watching the countdown. Leading up, there had been something like a pre-game show. They showed pre-taped (since everyone was aboard the shuttle already) interviews with all the astronauts - Particularly Christa McAuliffe, since she was the hot news of the mission. The feed cut to her students all wishing her luck. It cut to students in my town, sitting on a rug, "indian-style", looking up at the TV on one of those big metal carts with the shelf for a top-loading VCR. The clock counted down. The engines roared to life. The shuttle blazed in to the sky....
Then there on live TV I watched as, for the first time in my life, 7 people met a very sudden and very tragic end.
I touched the TV screen as if it somehow would help.
It seems, when I see old video of tragic happenings... like Indy 500 wrecks and things like that... the camera cuts away as soon as they realise something went wrong. I don't know if this was the beginning of "you see it here" reporting or if the cameraman was as stunned as I was but nobody turned away. The cloud of vapor, smoke, and remains billowed larger and bits rained down. Unlike when I later saw the collapse of Tower 2, there was no screaming, no "OH THE HUMANITY". It was almost as if that moment had been created for me to see.
Maybe if you watched in school that day, your teacher hurried to turn off the screen. Perhaps you later watched Mr. Rogers talk to you about death. You got to discuss with your friends what you saw and how it made you feel. I've heard stories of children around the cape that day being kept inside because of the dangers of debris and poisons raining down.
Me? I was alone.
My memory of the minutes that followed differ from that of my parents. One thing we can agree on, though, is that I had turned on the TV myself and that I watched the launch myself and that before I walked in to the bedroom and broke the news of what had just happened I made a resolution.
I would become an astronaut and I would carry on what those 7 could not.
My parents were supportive in the mini-NASA I created to fill the void during the downtime to redesign the shuttle's rockets. My dad took me to the hobby shop to pick out Estes model rockets to build. While he shot the breeze, I learned how to race slot cars and actually won packs of engines from time-to-time by beating guys far older than me. I would drink Yoo-Hoo and play Pac Man. Though, as I was so young that nobody thought to discuss strategy, it wouldn't be until I was 22 that I understood the goal of Pac Man.
We lived across the railroad tracks from an Army base. Back in those days, it was as if whatever land you could walk on was yours so we would pick our way across the sticky ties and jumbles of ballast to the an open field at the base and launch our rockets. My favourite was The Wasp. It was about 3.5 inches high - just enough to fit a parachute in - yellow with a black nose cone and 3 black fins. When we weren't building rockets, I would sit on my dad's lap and help him out with balsa models or he would teach me morse code.
I still don't know morse code. Sorry Dad.
By the time we started sending people back in space, I was in school. As expected, I was the only one in my class who could read. I had already been writing my name for several years. I couldn't yet tie my shoes, but that was okay because velcro was totally in fashion then. Oh yeah, and I had been the only student who had seen the Challenger explode. When it came for our time to sit on the rug, indian-style, and watch the launch, I was a bit nervous. Being the only one in class who responded with "AN ASTRONAUT!" (in exactly the tone you'd expect from an all-caps 6 year old) to the "what do you want to be when you grow up?" question, I guess I had been partly to blame for the viewing.
Thankfully, everything went well and the whole space business was back in business. We were gonna launch shuttles to space. We were gonna put satellites, and cameras, and lasers into space. We were gonna keep an eye on those godless commies from space. We were gonna take our trash to space and solve that whole eco problem. And... Oh, and best of all.. WE WERE GONNA LIVE IN SPACE!!!
I was right along for every step of that ride. I excelled in school, winning state mathematics competitions, skipping grades, and being selected for special "high ability" classes. Around 3rd grade, following stepping on a dead Alewife at Tiscornia Park, I started studying biology. For most young girls, this would mean reading a few books from the school library and making a scrapbook about the life cycle of a frog. I think it's pretty apparent that I was not most young girls. For me, studying biology meant going to seminars about DNA (and being the youngest one in there by a good 20 years) and learning human anatomy from my uncle Tom's art books - yes, serious art books not "art books". He was a special effects artist.
I even got a special trip to the Kalamazoo Air Zoo to meet an astronaut. And, would you believe it, I have never been able to remember who it was. I'm sure it was someone from U of M which means that I probably met a guy who's walked on the moon and don't remember which one it is.
Sorry, Guy Who Walked on the Moon.
Then one clear day, almost as clear as the day I made my original declaration, something magical came across my desk. A brochure for Space Camp.
As an avid Double Dare watcher, I knew about Space Camp. This was the pre-internet days, though, so getting information about Space Camp wasn't as easy as going to http://www.spacecamp.com/ or following the ever informative @SpaceCampCur8r on twitter. This brochure was the first time that I really had Space Camp in my hands.
"Mom, can I go to Space Camp?" "Of course!", says the woman in the way that only someone who knows her 9 year old daughter is going to Space Camp with or without her permission would say.
So I had a Tupperware party to raise the money to go to Space Camp.
I do not know what kid in her right mind decides that Tupperware is the way to go. Any normal child would have sold lemonade or something. Heck, I had been top cookie seller in my Girl Scout council 3 years in a row. I could have sold the snot out of some lemonade.
But when your "friends" are all in their late 20's, are astronomers, teahouse owners, and antique collectors, lemonade won't cut it.
I didn't end up making enough for my Space Camp trip, but I did have enough for a very nice set of luggage to take with me when I did go. So I got the luggage. It served me well when, as a consolation for not getting the funds for Space Camp (what I thought was merely a temporary setback), a friend took me and a couple other kids down to Purdue to meet what would someday be our professors. We got a tour of the grounds and saw the thousand person lecture halls and ate lunch at one of the dining centers. It was like we were prospective students - except we weren't yet in junior high.
I came home totally invigorated and focused like a raygun on the prize of spaceflight. I kept kicking ass and taking names in the sciences but under the wing of my uncle and a Ms. Betty Bea Washburne, I also started kicking ass in the arts. I joined the show choir and started tasting a little bit of that show choir fame. I got scholarships for summer art camps where I learned not only the art of Raku but also the construction of "works bombs". While people started catching up to me in the mathematics contests, I was still far ahead in the art contests with my work being shown not only in the special student galleries around town but also in the statehouse and in books. For a national Girl Scouts commemoration, I had been selected among others in my council to record a special version of their song "We Change the World" that was sent to the president. Of the U.S. Yeah, I was that big.
As I came to the end of 4th grade 2 things happened back-to-back that would change my life forever.
I became severely ill and a week of intense fever and dehydration scrambled the hell out of my brain.
My Odyssey of the Mind team took 6th overall at state and 3rd in Drama.
5th grade started pretty normally... for the high-ability core. In some ways it was nice because we pretty much had a free run of our little building. We painted murals on the walls. Class projects involved learning the physics of light through burning patches of the football field and building communication skills through assembling wheelbarrows for the local hardware store. We learned biology from one of the best science teachers in the state (seriously, commendations from the governor and everything) and were dissecting whole pigs before the year was over. I started slipping in my grades, though. Up to that point, I had never had less than an A. Even an A- was cause for concern. These classes were just a challenge to me.
In the end, I chalked it up to having just lost my brother to suicide. Anyone who loses someone dear to them is bound to slip, right?
It was in art camp that summer that I realised how far I had slipped. I just didn't care anymore. Brother Moonshot was only 17 when he killed himself. He had lived a hard life, but had gotten himself cleaned up and on a good path. His death was a complete shock to everyone - including his therapist, whom he had seen just 2 days before.
My last words to him, after a rousing duel in the videogame Road Rash, were "see you later".
I had to start seeing a therapist of my own on a very regular basis after he died. My mom had very spotty employment, so I didn't get the advantage of sitting in a quiet room with a sensitive analyst. I spent an hour in a hard plastic chair at a desk in a florescent lit cube telling my life to a student more interested in taking notes than setting me back on a path. As I told one, "I feel like everything was static and after he died I suddenly tuned in the channel and it was all clear", I began to suspect that the choice for science was thrust upon me by the Lineage of Geeks. I didn't care anymore. From that day on, Sally Moonshot was Sally CelloPaint.
I don't know if it was a self-fulfilling prophecy or what, but my return to school in the fall showed exactly what I expected - 1st Chair cello, Blue Ribbon linocut prints, published poetry.
I still excelled in science - this year, we were learning basic chemistry and physics. All we needed to know was the theories and terminology. No calculations, no formulas. Mathematics was a different story. I had forgotten everything. Even those rote-learned multiplication tables were lost. I had to count on my fingers for addition and subtraction, and when called out on it learned the "dots on the corners" method. "Oh, I just got lazy over the summer", I figured. I didn't eventually catch up. I slipped further and further and further behind.
By the end of the fall semester, I had a D in math.
The next year was the same thing. Rockin' progress in most everything. Went to the County Geography Bee. Did a special program at the Air Zoo. Sang to representatives from the town of Takasaki, Japan.
Failing math.
At least until I transferred schools and everyone taught me how to cheat. I had never cheated on a test or assignment in my life. Now it was the only way I could pull a good enough grade to not get abusive punishment from my stepmother. So I cheated. I cheated my ass off. I copied assignments. I made cribsheets for tests. I even went in to the teacher's gradebook and gave myself better grades. I explained it away by saying "everyone else does it".
I would Godwin the previous paragraph, but why bother. Even though the water's so far under the bridge, it's dolphin piss, I still feel bad. "Everyone else does it" is not an acceptable excuse for any behaviour.
For that, I'm sorry to everyone.
The school lacking anything even closely resembling an art program, I tossed myself back into science. I was living with my dad again. He would take me to work with him over breaks and I was learning circuitry again. We were building radios together. I helped rebuild the engine on the '72 Volkswagon Microbus. I had someone I could talk to about the amazing things we did in Gail Gentry's science class. And, again, I won science contests. Still couldn't do the math behind the workings, but I knew the Scientific Method like I knew my own name.
Still didn't care though. Outside my dad and my best friend Jill, there wasn't really anything in life for me. At school, they thought I was a satan worshiping lesbian and suggested I become an altar server as the cure. In sport, I was a joke that served a volleyball about as well as the Hubble focused. And at home, my stepmother became increasingly hostile until the point came that she kicked my dad and I out of the house. At 14 years old, I was homeless.
And that was the official end of caring until now.
During the final portfolio review for my studio lighting class my instructor, the incredibly talented James Godman, asked me "what are you passionate about?". I started crying because at that moment I could not come up with one thing that truly filled me up. I had possessions beyond compare, the love of many wonderful people, the respect of my peers, and professional prestige usually unheard of at that age. Even with all that, I was empty inside.
I hadn't feel a true spark of excitement for years until May 25, 2008 when WBBM radio, for some reason, broke through the usual programming to announce that Phoenix had landed on the surface of Mars. I was driving my POS '93 Saturn down Algonquin Road. I had just pulled up to a stop light when the announcement was made. I don't know why, but I felt such an elation and relief. This wasn't a manned mission. It wasn't close to the first time we did it. It was just a robot. It was just gonna go and snap some pics and roam around to see what it could see....
But, man, when they announced that Phoenix landed safely I felt like I had met some kind of personal goal.
I honked my horn and yelled "WE'RE ON MARS!!!!!!" I let out a big whoop without regard. The SUV beside me rolled down his window and was all "what?" "We're on Mars!" I told him. "What?" "Mars! We just landed on Mars!!" He turned his attention back to his cellphone, "we just landed on Mars, she says..."
As the light changed, I called out to pedestrians on the street "WE LANDED ON MARS!"
They must have thought I was a crazy lady.
If it was like Sally Moonshot's re-birthday, then Miss Moonshot's christening surely came when wechoosethemoon.org was launched for the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's moon mission.
The site (which should still be accessible but I'm too busy writing to check) featured "real time" mission data from the moment of launch to landing on earth. Wracked with insomnia - but discovering recently that I actually sleep on a really great space schedule - I would tune in at odd hours of the day to find a strange familiar comfort in the mundane checklist chatter.
On July 20, I featured "Moon Makeovers" at work. I cooked an early dinner and took care of all my affairs early so I could settle in and watch the "live" footage on Discovery.
As Armstrong set his foot down on the moon, my eyes leaked.
No disrespect to the promise I had made 23 years prior, but on that day I chose the moon.
So today I begin what I hope is the second-to-last chapter of my moon story.
Effective Tuesday, November 15, 2011 to Friday, January 27, 2012, NASA is accepting applications for the Astronaut Candidate Class of 2013. If you read this far and it's between those dates, you can actually go to http://astronauts.nasa.gov/ and see if you have "The Right Stuff" (ha ha ha).
This is exciting for several reasons. For one, this is pretty much the first Astronaut Candidate Class of my generation. Those of us who are sisters and brothers of Shuttle Columbia are now done with our studies. We're grown up. We have put in the time needed to qualify for the program.
More importantly....
We're gonna do this, folks. NASA's gonna light this candle and we're puttin' our feet on distant lands.
"So, Sally Moonshot," you ask, "you'll let us know when you hear back on your application, right?"
That, my friends, is another story for another day. This old lady's gotta get to bed.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
To The Moon.
Why the moon?
I believe that Kennedy said it best:
"Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there."
Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked."
In 1969, we achieved that goal - of landing a man (2 in fact) and returning him safely to earth. In the 3 years that followed, we did it again 5 more times. Since then, the US's NASA has sent men, women, and almost every order of animal into the skies, has developed systems with other nations, sent humans to low earth orbit on short and long term missions, and reached our robotic eyes and arms to the far reaches of space.
But why the moon?
Short answer: I don't know.
Call it folly, fascination, obsession, delusion... whatever. For some reason, my goal has always been to go to the moon. Even as a wee one, playing with my model Shuttle Enterprise and knowing I would sit beside Sally Ride someday, my goal was never low earth orbit. I would put my feet on the moon as sure as I have them on Earth today.
Always a goal setter, I had a few childhood dreams:
I would marry Davy Jones. That one kinda fell out when I learned what a "rerun" was and figured that the 40 year age difference would make a courtship too difficult.
I would become a rock star. Not quite, but I did play one song with a nice rock band at a festival many years ago. The 20,000+ crowd would have been welcomed had my recent diet not allowed my pants to fall too low while on stage. I'm sure the 20,000+ crowd would have welcomed me more had I not mooned them.
I would live in Chicago. Somehow, I always ended up living on an interstate route to Chicago. It seemed like a mystical land where everything was right (as long as you didn't say "Candyman" into a mirror or were fleeing Federal Marshals). For 9 years, I did just that. I lived in Chicago, worked at Navy Pier, went to the Judge Joe Brown show, rode the CTA, watched them dye the river green, ate Garrett's Popcorn, and cheered the Cubs. I only left because I had to choose between an expensive tuition or an expensive rent. After being homeless for 2 months, I knew I had to go somewhere cheaper to finish my schooling. Sad... Had I hung on just another month or so, the rental market bottomed out and I would have found somewhere in my price range.
I would go to the moon. Or Mars. Depended on the day you asked me. Even as a youngin' I knew Mars was where it was at. While my schoolmates were plotting to Jupiter (it's so big!) or Saturn (I like the rings!), I trusted the data that Mars was most closely analogous to us. The moon, though... Man... It's so hard to explain to sciencey people that you have a purely emotional reaction. Why do I want to go to the moon? I really don't know. It calls to me. The moon is Sputnik 0 - our original Traveling Companion. When I hear the words from the moon, my eyes leak. No, I don't cry. The emotional response I have to the moon is so autonomic that I can't even call what I have an emotional response. The moon is my soul. The moon is my home.
I choose to go to the moon because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of my energies and skills, because that challenge is one that I am willing to accept, one I am unwilling to postpone, and one which I intend to win.
And, knock on wood that Blogger will be there, you are coming along with me.
I believe that Kennedy said it best:
"Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there."
Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked."
In 1969, we achieved that goal - of landing a man (2 in fact) and returning him safely to earth. In the 3 years that followed, we did it again 5 more times. Since then, the US's NASA has sent men, women, and almost every order of animal into the skies, has developed systems with other nations, sent humans to low earth orbit on short and long term missions, and reached our robotic eyes and arms to the far reaches of space.
But why the moon?
Short answer: I don't know.
Call it folly, fascination, obsession, delusion... whatever. For some reason, my goal has always been to go to the moon. Even as a wee one, playing with my model Shuttle Enterprise and knowing I would sit beside Sally Ride someday, my goal was never low earth orbit. I would put my feet on the moon as sure as I have them on Earth today.
Always a goal setter, I had a few childhood dreams:
I would marry Davy Jones. That one kinda fell out when I learned what a "rerun" was and figured that the 40 year age difference would make a courtship too difficult.
I would become a rock star. Not quite, but I did play one song with a nice rock band at a festival many years ago. The 20,000+ crowd would have been welcomed had my recent diet not allowed my pants to fall too low while on stage. I'm sure the 20,000+ crowd would have welcomed me more had I not mooned them.
I would live in Chicago. Somehow, I always ended up living on an interstate route to Chicago. It seemed like a mystical land where everything was right (as long as you didn't say "Candyman" into a mirror or were fleeing Federal Marshals). For 9 years, I did just that. I lived in Chicago, worked at Navy Pier, went to the Judge Joe Brown show, rode the CTA, watched them dye the river green, ate Garrett's Popcorn, and cheered the Cubs. I only left because I had to choose between an expensive tuition or an expensive rent. After being homeless for 2 months, I knew I had to go somewhere cheaper to finish my schooling. Sad... Had I hung on just another month or so, the rental market bottomed out and I would have found somewhere in my price range.
I would go to the moon. Or Mars. Depended on the day you asked me. Even as a youngin' I knew Mars was where it was at. While my schoolmates were plotting to Jupiter (it's so big!) or Saturn (I like the rings!), I trusted the data that Mars was most closely analogous to us. The moon, though... Man... It's so hard to explain to sciencey people that you have a purely emotional reaction. Why do I want to go to the moon? I really don't know. It calls to me. The moon is Sputnik 0 - our original Traveling Companion. When I hear the words from the moon, my eyes leak. No, I don't cry. The emotional response I have to the moon is so autonomic that I can't even call what I have an emotional response. The moon is my soul. The moon is my home.
I choose to go to the moon because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of my energies and skills, because that challenge is one that I am willing to accept, one I am unwilling to postpone, and one which I intend to win.
And, knock on wood that Blogger will be there, you are coming along with me.
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