Today was spent doing a little research down at Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center. I drove down early and met up with Bill and Terry who both work with NASA and have helped see off some of the greats in our history of space exploration.  Today, I just did a whole lot of listening, and an equal amount of learning realizing as much as I thought I knew already — I barely knew anything at all.  Sobering.

They put me first into a G-Force Trainer flight which was really intense.  The amount of pressure that you feel especially during the first moments is pretty powerful — my entire face flew back like a piece of tissue paper during ignition and at one point I lost all feeling… your entire head just becomes numb and cold.  The one mistake I did make was wearing my glasses inside the trainer.  Rule of thumb — if you need glasses to see, remove them before you get on a NASA Official G-Force Trainer.  I know without my glasses I can in fact see — not well, but I’m far from blind —  apparently though, I thought going in seeing was more important than being able to hold my own body weight down.  Big mistake and tactical error.  I had no idea the amount of strength and force that takes over you.  Crashing and getting thrashed around inside a G-Force, or seeing?  Which one would you choose?  Luckily I was allowed to take off my glasses and even though I was a bit blurry, I was snugged in there nice and tight.  I spent a total of 45 minutes inside the Trainer and they even allowed me to keep my ipod on which I was shocked about. My music of choice during the training.

Terry, who is now 80 years old, talked to me a lot about how he remembered suiting up John Glenn and Sally Ride before their missions.  I loved this guy.  He had such a love and passion for space and space exploration you could sense it when he talked.  He spoke about how after Neil Armstrong returned from the moon, while he was cleaning out his suit, it has this unrecognizable smell… an odor of some kind that he just couldn’t place.  What was it?  Apparently, the smell of the moon.  Yes, the lunar odor of the moon is apparently incredibly strong and guess who got a special smell?  Me.  Yes, I was priviledged to take a giant whiff of a lunar sample and while I can’t say that it’s bad, it’s definitly unique.  It smells like the moon.  Imagine a real dusty basement that’s been frozen for years and suddenly it’s sealed doors are violently opened releasing this wave of condensed air.  That was how I would describe the smell.  How’s that for a description.  Can you imagine it?  The air of the lunar surface combined with the gas and smoke from the shuttle all combined to form a distinct scent that still remains on all the lunar samples even today.  Lunar moon perfume?  I would’t go that far just yet — it’s an aquired taste.

After a while of G-Forcing and storytelling, we drove out and I got to meet some people in the VAB Building which really impressed me. There are four entries to the bays located inside the building, each is the largest door in the world. Each door is 456 feet (139.0 m) high, takes 45 minutes to completely open or close. I felt like an ant in this place — completely tiny.  Like a bug.  I wonder what it must have felt like for all the astronaunts to see their craft being built just before they took off… the amount of people that go into putting a production like this together is massive.  Again, I had no idea.

Later in the afternoon they took me to see two shuttles. One which was part of the remains from the Challenger which Christa flew in, and the other is the upcoming launch currently scheduled for a few weeks from now.  Certain things were strictly off limits for me to share, but I was able to snap a few pictures together with the crew which I’ll see if I can get up here soon.  I got to ask a lot of questions about Christa as well as the crew, and it was good to spend some time in the very same places she had been just before the mission. 

If you want to hear a call-in I did for the “When We Left Earth” special which aired on the Discovery Channel earlier this year, you can do so here here. To experience that from the VIP area at Banana Creek with all the family and friends of the crew on board Discovery was an incredible experience.  Also, you can view my pictures and comments from the day at my twitter thread here.  I learned a lot, and now, I have even more questions.

As I was leaving I spotted an armadillo walking through the woods. I loved it.  They always remind me of long lost little dinosaurs.

Here he is.

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet and writer, In the Shadow of the Moon

 
This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives. It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed.

No one – no matter where he lives or what he does – can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours. Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by an assassin’s bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason. Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily – whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence – whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded. “Among free men,” said Abraham Lincoln, “there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs.” Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them. Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul. For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter. This is the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered. We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers. Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence. We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others.

We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge. Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution. But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

Bobby Kennedy, June 4, 1968