When I was a wee slip of a lad in the wilds of Central
New Jersey, I wanted to grow up to be a baseball pitcher, a cowboy, the
President of the United States and an astronaut.
I was in the third grade when
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, in hot
pursuit of the goals and mission statement outlined by the
too-young-to-be-martyred President John Kennedy, got into the manned space
flight program.
I used to see the President doing I never fully grasped
what on Sunday television so I figured I could combine that job with being a
Big League pitcher (the ideal summer job if you think about it, and I sure did.
A
lot). As for the cowboy part, who among us didn’t want to be one? This
was all pre-political correctness where the history of how the west was actually
won was heavily airbrushed in classrooms from sea to shining sea.
But returning to that reach-for-the-stars astronaut
stuff, could there ever be anything more exciting than shooting across the heavens
in steel and glass capsule? Talk about
amazing adventures and wondrous stories! But in all honesty there were things
we never thought about with space flight to include some of the most elemental
of needs and requirements.
And now, thanks
to the European Space Agency, ESA, I’m very much all out of any
questions and will be rejoining the rest of the crew once all the paperwork is
done. Assuming, of course, I can ever again recapture my adolescent ardor for
space flight and all the crap, literally, that comes with it.
-bill kenny
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