My dad was an aeronautical engineer and some of his work was involved with the space program. It was he who got me interested in space and the planets at a young age. It all started with standing in the yard one night watching brand-new Sputnik zoom overhead.
I read science fiction books and went to movies and just KNEW we were really going to do many of those things in my lifetime.
Then it all went ka-put. There are those who would like to build their own space programs but I won’t live long enough to see any of them come to fruition.
Bummer about your cold but I’m sitting here envious of that mug! LOL!
I guess I’ll tell this story one more time I’ve been posting it on some Pluto related threads. We moved to El Paso from Germany while I was in the Military. I have always been interested in Sci Fi, like you we watched Sputnick and were carried away by the space program. My job before we moved back to Ft. Bliss was that of a missile unit evaluator for NATO AAFCE at times and all the time for US Units. A lot off our work was done at night. I got interested in star gazing, my wife gave me a Walkman Astronomy tape so I was able to figure out all those stars I had been seeing on all those nights.
When we got home to the US I looked to Join an Astronomy club but there
was not a one in El Paso at the time, 1990, so I joined the closest one which was in Las Cruses. So I went to meetings there and to Star Parties I found the type of scope that would fit my needs bought one and had a great time observing.
One of our Observing sites was Upham, NM about 40 miles north of Las Cruses, which is now the home of Spaceport America. Anyway, I found out that we had a unique member of the club Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto. He was a very interesting guy to say the least. Always friendly with an engaging smile. I got to sit next to him a couple of times and saw him sporting this huge Walt Disney Pluto watch. It was very big and I often wondered if it was specialy made for him. He gave several talks about his Astronomy career. One of them was presenting all his hand drawn maps of Mars done at the Lowell Observatory in AZ the same Scope he used to find Pluto.
If you had seen pictures of him in his youth, it was kind of a shock to see him as a severely hunchbacked small of stature person that he had become. But he still seemed happy. Later he got too frail to come anymore and passed in 97. As I sit here typing a little bit of his ashes will soon pass by Pluto. God speed Clyde!