Shooting the Moon

End of Hiatus
It’s been a long time since my last post, which continued the proud tradition of creating completely unreliable predictions about the NCAA tournament. In the months since that time, I have spent my time buried in the world of working for an internet start-up company — with some extra time thrown in to get re-acclimated to the DC climate.

Even still, I regret the lapse of updates, and there’s no better time than the present to put things right.

Moving on.

Today, I was struck by an article going around on Slate.com dealing with the recent death of Neil Armstrong and NASA’s past glory. It’s a fantastic read that goes far beyond the petty controversy alluded to by its title, and it’s worth your time. Seriously.

Fascination
I’ve always loved NASA. As a child, I was enthralled by outer space in a way most kids are absorbed with Tonka trucks, dinosaurs, and Legos. I liked those things too, of course, but I could never learn enough about the solar system to satisfy my curiosity. What were the other planets like? What might lay hidden upon them? Could we ever make the journey there ourselves?

Lots of kids say they want to grow up to be firefighters, police officers, famous athletes, paleontologists, or astronauts. As for me? I wanted to be an astronomer.

I held no illusions about the astronaut thing — I never wanted to visit an unexplored planet on an untested craft in an experimental spacesuit. No, I wanted to visit our neighboring planets only after they’d been safely inhabited with futuristic space stations, and until then I’d be happy to simply read about them and learn what I could from good ol’ terra firma.

Early in high school, I realized several important things that changed my plans completely: First, that astronomers used an enormous amount of physics to do their work, and second, that I was very bad at advanced math. With main strengths skewed toward language, music, and the arts, I resigned myself to learning more about the fascinating universe around us by reading about it, and to leaving the science-y stuff to those who were better equipped to make discoveries.

My parents, both of whom are chemical engineers, weren’t super thrilled about my decision to tackle journalism as a trade, but hey — you’ve got to play to your strengths, and even they had to admit I wasn’t likely to figure out how light bent by a distant black hole translated into the presence of clustered heavenly bodies that even our most powerful telescopes can barely discern.

I’ve always been bothered by how little the average person knows about our solar system and its surroundings. There are dozens and dozens of fascinating moons, asteroids, planetoids, and more floating around out there, many of which contain the ingredients necessary for life as we know it — though in their extreme states. It’s an amazing universe out there, for anyone wondering.

What Else Awaits Us?
It’s not that we’ve lost our drive to explore since landing on the moon, either. We continue to pepper Mars with exploratory rovers, and we have satellites actively firing past the known reaches of our galaxy. Any day now, we expect to complete the first truly intergalactic transmission thanks to these latter explorers. Big things continue to happen, even as NASA hemorrhages funding and people lose their patience for projects measured in years instead of hours.

These achievements would be very inspiring, if only people could parse the daily chatter about inane celebrity antics and political bluster to hear about it.

I still think we’ll reach Mars someday, perhaps even in my lifetime. In doing so, I hope we can renew our tenacity toward expanding into the unknown, in peeling back the void.

We can be so much more than the bickering squabble media outlets would have you believe is the best humanity has to offer. The question is: Will we?