David Bowie

video from Youtube

David Bowie has had so many faces I couldn't pick just one to go at the top of this post. It came down to the fact that a static photo would not do. No matter of him as which persona or in which costume or with which face.

'Space Oddity,' my favorite David Bowie song, was released as a single in July, 1969. The above video was made at the same time.

I was a young adult and the song captured my sense of being hurled into the unknown with no tangible life support. Instructions from Ground Control (advice from my society) seemed too conventional. Completely irrelevant to my own weightless, planetless state.

At the same time Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon. He traveled through that weightless, planetless state to arrive safely on the moon and opened the entire universe to humanity. Me included.

Like Bowie, I tried on a vast array of personas. I used to think our wanderings were peculiar to the 60's generation. Not so. Just ask someone--anyone--from the generation who survived the Great Depression and World War II to today's Millennials who try to make sense of their world.

And here is where and who I am. I write about life in space. Murder on Ceres. I follow the International Space Station on Facebook. I celebrate each new step into space by many governments around the world and by as many private businesses. These things didn't exist in 1969.

Tomorrow is still unknowable and scary for all us Major Toms. And conventional wisdom still does not relate.

Bowie spoke for me and Neil Armstrong spoke to me. Now they're both gone. But I'm still here and as long as I am, I've got to be willing to make that leap. 

WE are still here and WE must be willing to make that leap.

video from YouTube
First space music video. Commander Chris Hadfield performed
'Space Oddity' on the International Space Station,
44 years after Bowie's original video.

An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth -- a review

 

 

This is the most inspirational book I’ve ever read. I qualify this statement with the explanation that I’ve been out of my self-improvement stage for at least 15 years. I do not read inspirational books and you won’t find this one on those shelves at the bookstore.

 There are so many quotable statements in this book. I put post-its on the ones that especially spoke to me so I could come back to them for this review. The book looks rather like a porcupine with all those strips of paper sticking out around its edges.

Chris Hadfield was nine years old when he went to a neighbor’s to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon. According to his book An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, he decided that very night that he wanted to be an astronaut. That probably didn’t make him a minority of one. But he dedicated himself to that goal, and he achieved it.

The first major obstacle to his ambition was his birthplace. He is Canadian. NASA only accepted Americans into the astronaut program.  There was no Canadian Space Agency then. “But . . . just the day before, it had been impossible to walk on the Moon. Neil Armstrong hadn’t let that stop him. Maybe someday it would be possible for me to go too, and if that day ever came, I wanted to be ready.”

Knowing full well that he hadn’t much of a chance at the job, he started right then to prepare himself. He did what any determined 9-year-old would do. He imagined what it would take to become an astronaut. He must be physically fit and he must fly.

He did have several things in his favor. His father was an airline pilot and flying was a part of his life. His parents encouraged education, responsibility, and good sense.

He flew in space three times – the first two during the Shuttle Era, first to MIR then to attach Canadarm2 to the ISS.

This photo was taken 7/2/2014 from the ISS of Hurricane Arthur

off the Florida coast. The object in the upper right quadrant

is Canadarm2 installed by Hadfield in 2001

His third space flight was on a Soyuz back to the ISS where he served as commander living in space five months, returning to Earth in May 2013.

 He talks about attitude. “Our safety depends on many tens of thousands of people we’ll never meet, like the welders in Russia who assemble the Soyuz, and the North American textile workers who fabricate our spacesuits. And our employment depends entirely on millions of other people believing in the importance of space exploration. We work on behalf of everyone, so we should behave the same way whether we’re meeting with a head of state or a seventh-grade science class. Frankly, this makes good sense even if you’re not an astronaut. You never really know who will have a say in where you wind up. It could be the CEO. But it might well be the receptionist.”

 About leadership. There was an emergency EVA just before he returned to Earth from his mission as ISS Commander. “Throughout the five-and-a-half-hour spacewalk, I felt a bit like a choreographer probably does while watching dancers perform; there was a sense of involvement and responsibility, a feeling of shared risk and reward, but also a necessity to detach and trust them to do their jobs properly.” He expresses pride in his team’s work on that EVA and in himself for “living up to NASA’s belief that I was capable of commanding the world’s spaceship.”

 

 

“Determined as I was to be ready, I was equally determined to enjoy myself. I lack the gene for martyrdom.” 

 



Here he is with his cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity"

with a few changes to the lyrics.

Give it a listen and a watch.

I is for the Internet

     If you have time and even if you don't, the internet is out there to inspire, intrigue, and irritate you. I use it much the same way that I've used the dictionary all my life. I have a particular word to look up. I find it and along the way I find another that I must check out, which of course brings up something else. Before I know it, hours have fled, the laundry's not done, and the dogs want to be fed.

     Today, before I decided on my I-word, I was surfing http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/p/a-to-z-challenge-sign-uplist-2014.html. This is a list of bloggers participating in the April A to Z Blogging Challenge. I've been dipping into the blogs randomly, sometimes because I like its title, sometimes because it's next on the list, and sometimes I click on one by mistake.

     This morning I clicked on Amrita @ The Book Drifter (BO.) Who could resist The Book Drifter?

  

Iridiscent by KM #atozchallenge   

     Oooooo. Shiny. Pretty colors. An ammonite! I am hooked. And a poem. Not just any poem, but a witty, word play, anagram. This was my inspiration for today.

     I've been enamoured of ammonites since my first divorce thirty-six years ago. Lake Texoma's bed is limestone. (If you research limestone . . . But that's another story. And so is Lake Texoma.) Suffice it to say that limestone is often rich in fossils. Ammonites are the most unusual (at least to me) and certainly the biggest fossils on the shores of Lake Texoma.

My small pieces of non-iridescent ammonites

 





     My as yet unpublished book Murder on Ceres would not be possible for me to write without the internet. NASA's website is invaluable.  http://www.nasa.gov/  They have amazing photos. If you've never surfed NASA, you're in for a treat.

     And Youtube's video of  Chris Hadfield's cover of David Bowies 'Space Oddity' while aboard the ISS makes me smile. Check it out  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo

     The Internet!