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Going to Space
Who do you serve?
I was born to an Air Force family in 1956 in ye old England. I grew up on ancient short films about space travel, shown before a main film, about anything else really. Little stories up front! And on TV there were old shows about travelling to outer space, and the men and women who accomplished this feat. Buck Rogers stories. Jules Verne. Amazing stories from periodicals of all kinds. It was one of the great stories of my entire life. It was actually my favorite dream story of all time — humans going to space. I could start to list all those shows, but the internet will inform you of these if you wish to see that much. It is simply key to realize that going to space has been a dream of humanity’s for a very long time now. But, we did start to make going ‘out there’ real, when we a) put satellites up around Earth. Satellites can be thought of as orbiting robots of various kinds and sizes. There are many now, up around Earth. We sent these out as Voyager robots past the solar system and out into what counts as a wild blue yonder desert in space, and c) when man’s outer space explorations began, culiminating in landing on the Moon. My dad was a communications engineer who helped install the carefully selected Atlantic downrange communications arrays that tracked the first manned missions to the moon. I stood on my front yard in Florida and watched these first manned missions take off from…
