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January 16, 2004
Doing his part for NASA
Whether or not it's an election year ploy - the famous phrase "promising the moon" comes to mind - I can't really say. His daddy, President George Herbert Walker Bush, proposed sending a man to Mars in 1989. The very idea could at least lend itself to a resurgence of confidence in American technology, which has fallen by the wayside in many ways to imports from Japan, South Korea and other nations. Of course some scientists are already complaining there is no money attached. We're already spending $400 billion per year on defense. I was a young boy when President Kennedy pledged we'd have a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. The Russians were one up on us by launching the first man into space with Sputnik in 1957. I recalled the ticker tape parade for astronaut John Glenn after he circled the earth three times in 1962. Americans swooned about all the technology in the 60s, like looking at all those gadgets demonstrated by Agent Q in the James Bond movies. However, after astronaut Neal Armstrong echoed the famous words, "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," while stepping out onto the moon, I've lost a lot of interest in the space program. A corporal who flew into space in the 1980s, Walt Cunningham, told ABC News Sunday night the U.S. needs to stop sending up teachers and high school science projects and get serious about the space program. My apologies to the grade school kids in Pahrump who sent up their signatures on microfilm in a space shot two years ago. The rock group Jefferson Airplane mocked the landing of man on the moon in 1969 on the cover of the album "Volunteers." It joked about things like thrilling to the sight of moon rocks while there were serious social problems at home. However, if President Bush wants to establish a permanent base on the moon perhaps we could ship things to the moon we don't want, like nuclear waste, or people we don't want, like Saddam Hussein. That's about as far away in this modern world as was the English sending convicts to Australia in the 1800s. The Hubble telescope snapped some great shots of the universe from space, outside of earth's gravity. We could do the same on the moon. I don't know if I'd want to share space with the Russians on the space shuttle anyway. Some things that were the subject of speculation by futurists years ago are now reality, like when Walter Cronkite rode a monorail in the show "The 20th Century." Tomorrowland at Disneyland once featured a device where you could see the person you were talking to on the phone; that's now possible with those special new cell phones that take pictures. I can say I did my part for the space program. In 1982, while I was between jobs, sleeping on the couch at my brother's house in the Houston suburb of Clear Lake City, near NASA, my sister-in-law showed me a want ad in the Clear Lake City Times for a NASA test subject. I fit the right category, a healthy, young man in his 20s. A company named Technology Incorporated, appropriately enough, was doing the test. It was a little intimidating walking into a room with a group of scientists in white coats seated around a table, initialing every paragraph then signing on the dotted line. They checked me into Mercy Hospital. The first four days they put us on a salt free diet, otherwise we were free to walk around the hospital. A nurse took us on a tour of the LBJ Space Center where we saw some of the rockets used in the program and toured the famous mission control pictured on television, only it was much smaller than I imagined. Then came the big day, the start of the three day bed rest study. We were placed on a bed with our feet at a six-degree angle above our head. This was so, eventually; the fluids would rise to the upper part of our bodies to simulate the space sickness that astronauts feel, since under zero gravity, body fluids don't stay down. The nurses put a radioactive isotope through my blood system as a tracer. Friends later jokingly asked if I glowed in the dark. On the first day doctors put a catheter near my heart, for which I earned an extra $1,000. I was required to give urine samples every half hour, for a few hours each day, the other guy who shared the room seemed to be able to urinate on demand. The only time we were allowed to get out of bed was when we were weighed in the morning. After three days I understood how the astronauts must feel. I was constipated and nauseous. After the study was over, I had a couple thousand dollars in my pocket. My girlfriend joined me in Houston and we traveled down to Oaxaca state in southern Mexico for a vacation. There was a news report some rock stars were planning to shoot into space on Dec. 31, 1999 to celebrate the arrival of the new millennium. But it was American billionaire Dennis Tito who became the first space tourist, paying $20 million to fly on a Russian spacecraft. Even though it is a nauseous feeling, I know if NASA asked for a reporter to go on a space shot I couldn't refuse. The idea was mentioned once before in the press, artist Gary Trudeau of "Doonesbury" fame penned a humorous aside on the suggestion, as if Andy Rooney was chosen to go. In quoting Rooney, as the spacecraft is seen gliding off in space, the caption reads something like this: You know what I really hate about these spacecraft? |
