Good Luck Endeavour

After nearly a month of trying, Endeavour finally lifted off last night. I want to wish the crew and everybody at Nasa good luck on this flight and for the crew's safe return in two weeks.

Pete Conrad: Rocket Man

Rocket Man is a biography about astronaut and Apollo 12 Moon-walker Pete Conrad. This book was written by his widow Nancy Conrad and Howard A. Klausner.

I was attracted to this book, because Pete Conrad was an astronaut during the Golden Age of Space Flight. All I can say, is that this book did not disappoint. It was well written and lacked the acronyms and other technical jargon that can make books like this hard to understand.

There were many aspects to this book that I found very fascinating.

When Conrad was a kid, he suffered from Dyslexia, and at the time he was growing up, not much was known about Dyslexia, and people thought you were either stupid or slow if you had it. In other words, no accommodations were made. Therefore, Pete Conrad struggled with Dyslexia, and had to overcome it himself. He was kicked out of a private school in philadelphia (because of grades) and his mom found one that would better accommodate him.

Eventually Conrad would thrive at this new private school, and he would be accepted into the Naval Academy and become an aviator and a real good pilot.

Another thing that I found interesting and amusing, was that Conrad could have been accepted into the Mercury Program. He decided to quit the program for various reasons, and when he did have enough, he threw an enema bag on the generals desk, and went back to his job as a test pilot flying the F-4 Phantom.

Pete Conrad was eventually named to the second group of astronauts, and had a successful career at NASA. After NASA, the book talks about his career at McDac (McDonnell Douglas), and starting a space exploration company in the years before his death. While at McDac he was a DC-10 salesman, and more importantly he investigated American Airlines Flight 191, and came to the conclusion (Fork lift maintenance (a big no no)) before the FAA.

Conclusion: I recommend this book

Publisher: New American Library (Penguin Group, USA)

Published: May, 2005 (Hardcover)

New Class of Astronauts

I was on twitter the other day (I subscribe to various NASA updates) and I found out that Nasa announced a 2009 class of astronauts. An MSNBC article mentions that this new class will never fly on the space shuttle. Right now NASA has plenty of astronauts, and too few missions remaining. The reason I decided to mention this, is because the Space Shuttle program (Discovery, Atlantis, & Endeavour) will be retired in 2010. After the shuttle NASA will be paying the Russians $51 million for a ride on the Soyuz space craft to reach the ISS. Right now there is an ever expanding gap before NASA can send astronauts back into space. The Ares program has been called into question, and Mr. Obama has ordered commission to review the Ares program and the Orion Capsule that make up Constellation which will send astronauts to the ISS, the Moon and then to Mars.

With all that said, there will not be any space flights by NASA for a while. Now that these individuals have been accepted, it will take two years of training for them to become a full fledged astronaut. That is alot of money that NASA will invest in these people who may or may not make into space. As somebody typing on a keyboard, logic tells me, that it would be much wiser to use that money on the Constellation Program.