Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Space exploration and Commodore 64

I’ve been reading about the Artemis Project, which is this effort to launch people to the moon in the next 10 years or so. (You can read about it here) It’s a pretty cool plan, really, and involves a lot of commercialism and a lot of volunteers. I guess if you are a rocket scientist sitting around doing not much of anything and an opportunity comes to design a giant booster or something comes up, you probably would decide to work on it.

I’ve been on this SciFi bent lately, and I don’t know if it is because of all the Mars stuff, or the Commodore 64 is bringing back repressed memories, or all of the talk of old SciFi zines sounds cool, or what. When I was in high school and took many study halls in order to avoid becoming an overachiever, I read about every book in the library to stay awake. This meant a lot of SciFi – old school stuff like Asimov, and Bradbury, and Clarke. Now, it’s hard to get into some of the junk science-based SciFi, but some of it has enough spirit in it to be readable. I’m reading the book Red Mars now, which talks about settling on mars, and terraforming, and all that, but it’s well done. I think I want to check out the whole trilogy.

I’ve always been into the whole space exploration thing, too. In grade school, I memorized all of the books about the manned space missions. Even in college, I followed all of the shuttle missions on the internet, and kept up with the construction of the Endeavour. It’s a fun bug, but you can’t exactly finish college with a 2.1 GPA and go work for NASA. Oh well..

I’m having a real non-day, and I’m feeling a bit sick. Maybe I’ll skip out for the rest of today.