Packing For Mars Quotes

Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government redlining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered. Let's squander some on Mars. Let's go out and play.

Space doesn't just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.

Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration.

He has a minor in explosives and the slightly bitter, misanthropic personality of someone who shouldn't.

the act of vomiting deserves your respect. It's an orchestral event of the gut.

The suffix 'naut' comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. Astronaut suggests 'a sailor in space.' Chimponaut suggests 'a chimpanzee in sailor pants'.

No one is excluded from the astronaut corps based on penis size.

The nobility of the human spirit grows harder for me to believe in. War, zealotry, greed, malls, narcissism. I see a backhanded nobility in excessive, impractical outlays of cash prompted by nothing loftier than a species joining hands and saying “I bet we can do this.” Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government red-lining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered. Let’s squander some on Mars. Let’s go out and play.

Ability to Function Despite Imminent Catastrophe.

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you'll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its structural elements don't start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep. To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavor so endlessly intriguing.

Upon the occasion of history's first manned flight - in the 1780's aboard the Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloons - someone asked Franklin what use he saw in such frivolity. "What use," he replied, "is a newborn baby?

Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.

The human organism is built for tension and relaxation, work and sleep. The principle of life is rhythm.

Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God.

(As brain cells die from oxygen starvation, euphoria sets in, and one last, grand erection.)

As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he'd like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, "A loving husband and devoted father," though in reality, he jokes in "Riding Rockets," "I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space.

NASA might do well to adopt the Red Bull approach to branding and astronautics. Suddenly the man in the spacesuit is not an underpaid civil servant; he's the ultimate extreme athlete. Red Bull knows how to make space hip.

Under the section heading “Experiments with Human Subjects” – a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased –

Hydromedusa tectifera are, like post-war Nazis, native to Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil.

Borman's dumping urine. Urine [in] approximately one minute." Two lines further along, we see Lovell saying, "What a sight to behold!

I remember watching Morin walk away from me, the endearing gait and the butt that got lubed for science, and thinking, 'Oh my god, they're just people.

Gravity disappears again, and we rise up off the floor like spooks from a grave. It's like the Rapture in here every thirty seconds.

What’s different? Sweat, risk, uncertainty, inconvenience. But also, awe. Pride. Something ineffably splendid and stirring.

Brave and anal: the ideal space explorer. Though you don’t find “anal” on any of those lists of recommended astronaut attributes. NASA doesn’t really use words like anal. Unless they have to.

According to more than one astronaut memoir, one of the most beautiful sights in space is that of a sun-illumined flurry of flash-frozen waste-water droplets. Space doesn’t just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.

People can't anticipate how much they'll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it. I have read about submarine crewmen who haunt the sonar room, listening to whale songs and colonies of snapping shrimp. Submarine captains dispense 'periscope liberty'- a chance to gaze at clouds and birds and coastlines and remind themselves that the natural world still exists. I once met a man who told me that after landing in Christchurch, New Zealand, after a winter at the South Pole research station, he and his companions spent a couple days just wandering around staring in awe at flowers and trees. At one point, one of them spotted a woman pushing a stroller. 'A baby!' he shouted, and they all rushed across the street to see. The woman turned the stroller and ran.

[I] threw open the door to find Rob sit­ting on the low stool in front of my book­case, sur­round­ed by card­board box­es. He was seal­ing the last one up with tape and string. There were eight box­es - eight box­es of my books bound up and ready for the base­ment! "He looked up and said, 'Hel­lo, dar­ling. Don't mind the mess, the care­tak­er said he'd help me car­ry these down to the base­ment.' He nod­ded to­wards my book­shelves and said, 'Don't they look won­der­ful?' "Well, there were no words! I was too ap­palled to speak. Sid­ney, ev­ery sin­gle shelf - where my books had stood - was filled with ath­let­ic tro­phies: sil­ver cups, gold cups, blue rosettes, red rib­bons. There were awards for ev­ery game that could pos­si­bly be played with a wood­en ob­ject: crick­et bats, squash rac­quets, ten­nis rac­quets, oars, golf clubs, ping-​pong bats, bows and ar­rows, snook­er cues, lacrosse sticks, hock­ey sticks and po­lo mal­lets. There were stat­ues for ev­ery­thing a man could jump over, ei­ther by him­self or on a horse. Next came the framed cer­tificates - for shoot­ing the most birds on such and such a date, for First Place in run­ning races, for Last Man Stand­ing in some filthy tug of war against Scot­land. "All I could do was scream, 'How dare you! What have you DONE?! Put my books back!' "Well, that's how it start­ed. Even­tu­al­ly, I said some­thing to the ef­fect that I could nev­er mar­ry a man whose idea of bliss was to strike out at lit­tle balls and lit­tle birds. Rob coun­tered with re­marks about damned blue­stock­ings and shrews. And it all de­gen­er­at­ed from there - the on­ly thought we prob­ably had in com­mon was, What the hell have we talked about for the last four months? What, in­deed? He huffed and puffed and snort­ed and left. And I un­packed my books.

My interpreter Sayuri is folding a piece of notebook paper. She is at step 21, where the crane's body is inflated. The directions show a tiny puff besides an arrow pointing at the bird. It makes sense if you already know what to do. Otherwise, it's wonderfully surreal: Put a cloud inside a bird.

many space psychology experiments these days focus on ways to detect stress or depression in a person who doesn’t intend to tell you about it.

As on Earth, weight-bearing exercise is the best way to hang on to your bone. In zero gravity, of course, you have to create your weight.

Urine is a salty substance (though less so than the NASA Ames chili), and if you were to drink it in an effort to rehydrate yourself, it would have the opposite effect.

No one goes out to play anymore. Simulation is becoming reality.

Stanford University suggests that a two-year mission to Mars would have about the same effect on one’s skeleton. Would an astronaut returning from Mars run the risk of stepping out of the capsule into Earth gravity and snapping a bone?

They have this idea that they can send astronauts up and the bone loss will level off in a few months, but the evidence that has come back doesn’t support that view. If you look at a two-year mission to Mars, it’s kind of a scary prospect.

It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking. Is cutting the organs out of a dead man and stitching them into someone else barbaric and disrespectful, or is it a straightforward operation to save multiple lives? Does crapping into a Baggie while sitting 6 inches away from your crewmate represent a collapse of human dignity or a unique and comic form of intimacy?

One of the things I love about manned space exploration is that it forces people to unlace certain notions of what is and isn't acceptable. And possible. It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking.

(As brain cells die from oxygen starvation, euphoria sets in, and one last, grand erection.) Space

In reality, maybe 1 percent of an astronaut’s career takes place in space, and 1 percent of that is done in a pressure suit.

Weightlessness is like heroin, or how I imagine heroin must be. You try it once, and when it's over, all you can think about is how much you want to do it again. But apparently the thrill wears off.

It began with meetings, five months before the Apollo 11 launch. The newly formed Committee on Symbolic Activities for the First Lunar Landing gathered to debate the appropriateness of planting a flag on the moon.

No one spotted anything wrong with the pilot’s ID?” Mr Brown stepped closer and studied the corpse. “Interesting. Same modus as they used with Ms Hollister?” He stepped back to gain perspective and looked round. “Have forensics examined her?” “Yes, sir. Confirmed the use of a needle dart. They say it is difficult to put a time of death on her because the killer used a body coolant to drop the temperature and preserve it. One other thing, sir. Someone took a skin peel from her hands, and they made a face mould and took hair from her head.” “Professional then.” Mr Brown paused. “Very well, I’ll talk to the head of forensics. Inform next of kin and prepare a media release.” He ran a check. “If whoever killed her piloted the last shuttle to the surface and used her ID and passed the DNA check, that means the murderer is now on Mars.” Turning to go, he ordered, “Hold the next of kin and media release until I say otherwise. I don’t want anyone to know we’ve found her.”  

After six months, you forget how heavy things are. Like, yourself.” You also, after months of weightlessness, forget how to use your legs. “Your muscles don’t remember what to do.” And astronauts have no pit crew to rush

Capacity to Tolerate Boredom and Low Levels of Stimulation” is one of the recommended attributes on a Space Shuttle–era document drafted by the NASA In-House Working Group on Psychiatric and Psychological Selection of Astronauts.

The staff played hot potato with my call until someone could locate the Person in Charge of Lying to the Press. The PCLP said that the room that houses the base archives is locked. And that only the curator would have a key. And that Holloman currently has no curator. Evidently the new curator’s first task would be to find a way to open the archives.

The V-2’s directional system was notoriously erratic. In May 1947, a V-2 launched from White Sands Proving Ground headed south instead of north, missing downtown Juarez, Mexico, by 3 miles. The Mexican government’s response to the American bombing was admirably laid back. General Enrique Diaz Gonzales and Consul General Raul Michel met with United States officials, who issued apologies and an invitation to come to “the next rocket shoot” at White Sands. The Mexican citizenry was similarly nonchalant. “Bomb Blast Fails to Halt Spring Fiesta,” said the El Paso Times headline, noting that “many thought the explosion was a cannon fired for the opening of the fiesta.

I will tell you sincerely and without exaggeration that the best part of lunch today at the NASA Ames cafeteria is the urine. It is clear and sweet, though not in the way mountain streams are said to be clear and sweet. More in the way of Karo syrup. The urine has been desalinated by osmotic pressure. Basically it swapped molecules with a concentrated sugar solution. Urine is a salty substance (though less so than the NASA Ames chili), and if you were to drink it in an effort to rehydrate yourself, it would have the opposite effect. But once the salt is taken care of and the distasteful organic molecules have been trapped in an activated charcoal filter, urine is a restorative and surprisingly drinkable lunchtime beverage. I was about to use the word unobjectionable, but that's not accurate. People object. They object a lot.

He told me that a German doctor named Wolff figured it out in the 1800s by studying X-rays of infants’ hips as they transitioned from crawling to walking. “A whole new evolution of bone structure takes place to support the mechanical loads associated with walking,” said Lang. “Wolff had the great insight that form follows function.” Alas, Wolff did not have the great insight that cancer follows gratuitous X-raying with primitive nineteenth-century X-ray machines.

AHall80: Heh. It’s all right. How you feeling? RubyMars: Compared to how I was feeling three weeks ago, a thousand times better. Compared to how I felt two months ago, still like crap. RubyMars: :) AHall80: You eating? RubyMars: Yes, Mommy Aaron. I’m back up ten pounds. RubyMars: Am I being too… familiar with you? I don’t want to make you feel weird. AHall80: No. You’re how I expected AHall80: You’re packing on that weight quick. RubyMars: …… AHall80: I’m messing with you. Glad you are AHall80: Am I being too familiar now? RubyMars: No, you’re just like I expected. RubyMars: :) RubyMars: How’s the constipation? AHall80: …. RubyMars: …. AHall80: …. RubyMars: No? You didn’t like that question? AHall80: ….. AHall80: Did you finish your dating website profile? RubyMars: I’ll take it you’re still constipated. AHall80: Who are you? RubyMars: I’m tired. I haven’t been sleeping much. My sister says I get feisty when I’m tired. AHall80: I see. Now I know for next time. I’ll be prepared.

Borman much later admitted that he was, as Cernan wrote in his memoir, “sick as a dog* all the way to the moon.

Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much normalcy can people forgo? For how long, and what does it do to them?

That was the mindset that propelled one of the AMRL’s least popular liquid diets into a long and lucrative career as Carnation Instant Breakfast.

The pole is nonconductive, enabling the savvy rescuer to save a life without joining the growing conga line of electrocution victims.

Seriously hairy shit was going down on a regular basis.

I remember watching Morin walk away from me, the endearing gait and the butt that got lubed for science, and thinking, “Oh my god, they’re just people.” NASA

Is it possible to bolster one’s hip bones by doing some type of controlled fall? Here

Most of them students from the nearby University of Dayton...

Funny thing happened on the way to the moon: not much,” wrote Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. “Should have brought some crossword puzzles.

With charm comes charm’s sidekick, dilapidation.

...frustration metastasizes to anger. Anger wants an outlet and a victim.

Could those sound waves shake apart your organs? NASA did testing on this back in the sixties, to be sure, as one infrasound expert told me, “that they didn’t deliver jam to the moon.

Pretty much any amino acid arrangement can be hydrolyzed, including those of the recyclable that dares not speak its name. A four-person crew will, over the course of three years, generate somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand pounds of feces. In the ominous words of sixties space nutritionist Emil Mrak, “The possibility of reuse must be considered.” Sometime

Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God. In the beginning, the cosmos was nothing but empty space and vast clouds of gases. Eventually the gases cooled to the point where tiny grains coalesced. These grains would have spent eternity moving through space, ignoring each other, had gravitational attraction not brought them together. Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.

Mir astronaut Jerry Linenger writes in his memoir that he was surprised to find a bottle of cognac in one arm of his spacesuit and a bottle of whiskey in the other. (Linenger was the Frank Burns of space exploration:

Medical journals from 1905 to 1915 are rife with articles on “vibratory massage” and the many things it cures. Weakened hearts and floating kidneys. Hysterical cramp of the esophagus and catarrh of the inner ear. Deafness, cancer, bad eyesight. And lots and lots of prostate problems. A Dr. Courtney W. Shropshire, writing in 1912, was impressed to note that by means of “a special prostatic applicator, well lubricated, attached to the vibrator, introduced to the rectum” he was “able to empty the seminal vesicles of their secretions.” Indeedy. Shropshire’s patients returned every other day for treatment, no doubt also developing a relationship with the vibration machine.

it is indeed possible for humans to copulate in weightlessness. However, they have trouble staying together. The covert researchers discovered that it helped to have a third person to push at the right time in the right place. The anonymous researchers…discovered that this is the way dolphins do it. A third dolphin is always present during the mating process. This led to the creation of the space-going equivalent of aviation’s Mile High Club known as the Three Dolphin Club. Stine

A four-person crew will, over the course of three years, generate somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand pounds of feces. In the ominous words of sixties space nutritionist Emil Mrak, “The possibility of reuse must be considered.” Sometime

FROM TIME TO TIME, there was talk among the astronauts that it might be nice to have a drink with dinner. Beer is a no-fly, because without gravity, carbonation bubbles don’t rise to the surface. “You just get a foamy froth,” says Bourland. He says Coke spent $450,000 developing a zero-gravity dispenser, only to be undone by biology. Since bubbles also don’t rise to the top of a stomach, the astronauts had trouble burping. “Often a burp is accompanied by a liquid spray,” Bourland adds.

NASA didn't invent Tang, but their Gemini and Apollo astronauts made it famous. (Kraft Foods invented it, in 1957.) NASA still uses Tang, despite periodic bouts of bad publicity. In 2006, terrorists mixed Tang into a homemade liquid explosive intended for use on a transatlantic flight. In the 1970's, Tang was mixed with methadone to discourage rehabbing heroin addicts from injecting it to get high. They did anyway. Consumed intravenously, Tang causes joint pain and jaundice, though fewer cavities.

by letter in Morse code. Kittinger says it was a joke, but Simons didn’t take it that way. (Morse code has always been a tough medium for humor.) In his memoir Man High, Simons recalls thinking that “the weird and little understood breakaway phenomenon could be taking hold of Kittinger’s mind,…that he…was gripped in this strange reverie and was hellbent on flying on and on without regard for the consequences.” Simons compared the breakaway phenomenon to “the deadly raptures of the deep.” “Rapture of the deep” is a medical condition

It is assumed that a man will fit one of the three sizes available in the condom-style urine collection device hose attachment inside the EVA suit. To avoid mishaps caused by embarrassed astronauts opting for L when they are really S, there is no S. “There is L, XL, and XXL,

to test. Would weightlessness put them off their game? It did. The turtles moved “slowly and insecurely” and did not attack a piece of bait placed directly in front of them. Then again, the water in which they swam was repeatedly floating up out of the jar and forming an “ovoid cupola.” Who could eat? Von Beckh quickly moved on from turtles to Argentinean pilots. Under the section heading “Experiments with Human Subjects”—a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased—von Beckh reports on the efforts of the pilots to mark X’s inside small boxes during regular and weightless flight. During weightlessness, many of the letters strayed from the boxes, indicating that pilots might experience difficulties maneuvering their planes and doing crossword puzzles during air battles. The following year, von Beckh was recruited by the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman Air Force

I applied to be a subject in a simulated Mars mission. I made it past the first round of cuts and was told that someone from the European Space Agency would call me for a phone interview later in the month. The call came at 4:30 A.M., and I did not take care to hide my irritation. I realized later that it had probably been a test, and I had failed it.

Space Shuttle toilets have always been mounted on the floor, but you would not call them normal. The original shuttle toilet bowl featured a set of 1,200 rpm Waring blender blades positioned a brief 6 inches below the sitter’s anatomy. The macerator would pulp the feces and tissue—meaning, if all went well, the paper, not the scrotal, variety—and fling it to the sides of a holding tank.

Nonetheless, some prototype chimp suits had been developed, including the “SPCA Suit”—certified humane by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “To prove that a suit was safe for a man, we were going to test it on a chimp, but to prove the suit was safe for a chimp, we had to test it on a man,” U.S. Spacesuits coauthor Joe McMann said in an email. “That was a mind boggler.

The Johnson Space Center “potty cam,” as it is more casually known, is an astronaut training aid. It provides a vivid, arresting perspective on something you’ve had intimate contact with all your life but never really seen. Perhaps not unlike viewing one’s home planet from space for the first time. Positioning is critical because the opening to a Space Shuttle toilet is 4 inches across, as opposed to the 18-inch maw we are accustomed to on Earth.

Space agencies keep a firm grip on their public image, and it's less troublesome for employees and contractors to say no to someone like me than to take their chances and see what I write. Happily there are people involved in the human side of space exploration who see value in unconventional coverage(or are just plain too nice to say no). For their candor and wit - and the generosity with which they shared their time and know-how - super-galactic thanks.

Given the complexity of the chore, “escapees,” as free-floating fecal material is known in astronautical circles, plagued the crews. Below is an excerpt from the Apollo 10 mission transcript, starring Mission Commander Thomas Stafford, Lunar Module Pilot Gene Cernan, and Command Module Pilot John Young, orbiting the moon 200,000-plus miles from the nearest bathroom. CERNAN:…You know once you get out of lunar orbit, you can do a lot of things. You can power down…And what’s happening is— STAFFORD: Oh—who did it? YOUNG: Who did what? CERNAN: What? STAFFORD: Who did it? [laughter] CERNAN: Where did that come from? STAFFORD: Give me a napkin quick. There’s a turd floating through the air. YOUNG: I didn’t do it. It ain’t one of mine. CERNAN: I don’t think it’s one of mine. STAFFORD: Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away. YOUNG: God almighty. [And again eight minutes later, while discussing the timing of a waste-water dump.] YOUNG: Did they say we could do it anytime? CERNAN: They said on 135. They told us that—Here’s another goddam turd. What’s the matter with you guys? Here, give me a— YOUNG/STAFFORD: [laughter]… STAFFORD: It was just floating around? CERNAN: Yes. STAFFORD: [laughter] Mine was stickier than that. YOUNG: Mine was too. It hit that bag— CERNAN: [laughter] I don’t know whose that is. I can neither claim it nor disclaim it. [laughter] YOUNG: What the hell is going on here?

Twenty-five percent of the nurses in one study, writes Larson, had dry, damaged skin. Ironically, the nurses may be exacerbating the very thing that hand-washing seeks to prevent: the spread of infectious bacteria. Larson says healthy skin sheds 10 million particles a day, and 10 percent of those harbor bacteria. Dry, damaged skin flakes off more readily than healthy, lubricated skin and thus disperses more bacteria. Damaged skin also harbors more pathogens than healthy skin. As

Firther evidence of the difficulties of reduced-gravity-sex comes from the sea otter. To help hold the female in place, the male will typically pull the female's head back and grab onto her nose with his teeth. "Our vets have had to do rhinoplasty on some of the females", says Michaelle Stadler, a sea otter reseach coordinator at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Sex can also be traumatic for the male otter, who endures aerial pecking attacks by sea gulls mistaking his erect penis for a novel ocean delicacy.

How’d you get the job?” says Lynn. “You’re not that special.” “It was more because of where I was after the simulation attack. Smack-dab in a pack of Dauntless traitors. I decided to go with it,” he says. “Not sure about Tori, though.” “She transferred from Erudite,” I say. What I don’t say, because I’m sure she wouldn’t want everyone to know, is that Tori probably seemed explosive in Erudite headquarters because they murdered her brother for being Divergent. She told me once that she was waiting for an opportunity to get revenge. “Oh,” says Zeke. “How do you know that?” “Well, all the faction transfers have a secret club,” I say, leaning back in my chair. “We meet every third Thursday.” Zeke snorts. “Where’s Four?” says Uriah, checking his watch. “Should we start without him?” “We can’t,” says Zeke. “He’s getting The Info.” Uriah nods like that means something. Then he pauses and says, “What info, again?” “The info about Kang’s little peacemaking meeting with Jeanine,” says Zeke. “Obviously.” Across the room, I see Christina sitting at a table with her sister. They are both reading something. My entire body tenses. Cara, Will’s older sister, is walking across the room toward Christina’s table. I duck my head. “What?” Uriah says, looking over his shoulder. I want to punch him. “Stop it!” I say. “Could you be any more obvious?” I lean forward, holding my arms on the table. “Will’s sister is over there.” “Yeah, I talked to her about getting out of Erudite once, while I was there,” says Zeke. “Said she saw an Abnegation woman get killed while she was on a mission for Jeanine and couldn’t stomach it anymore.” “Are we sure she’s not just an Erudite spy?” Lynn says. “Lynn, she saved half our faction from this stuff,” says Marlene, tapping the bandage on her arm from where the Dauntless traitors shot her. “Well, half of half of our faction.” “In some circles they call that a quarter, Mar,” Lynn says.

ever. Amen. Thank God for self-help books. No wonder the business is booming. It reminds me of junior high school, where everybody was afraid of the really cool kids because they knew the latest, most potent putdowns, and were not afraid to use them. Dah! But there must be another reason that one of the best-selling books in the history of the world is Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus by John Gray. Could it be that our culture is oh so eager for a quick fix? What a relief it must be for some people to think “Oh, that’s why we fight like cats and dogs, it is because he’s from Mars and I am from Venus. I thought it was just because we’re messed up in the head.” Can you imagine Calvin Consumer’s excitement and relief to get the video on “The Secret to her Sexual Satisfaction” with Dr. GraySpot, a picture chart, a big pointer, and an X marking the spot. Could that “G” be for “giggle” rather than Dr. “Graffenberg?” Perhaps we are always looking for the secret, the gold mine, the G-spot because we are afraid of the real G-word: Growth—and the energy it requires of us. I am worried that just becoming more educated or well-read is chopping at the leaves of ignorance but is not cutting at the roots. Take my own example: I used to be a lowly busboy at 12 East Restaurant in Florida. One Christmas Eve the manager fired me for eating on the job. As I slunk away I muttered under my breath, “Scrooge!” Years later, after obtaining a Masters Degree in Psychology and getting a California license to practice psychotherapy, I was fired by the clinical director of a psychiatric institute for being unorthodox. This time I knew just what to say. This time I was much more assertive and articulate. As I left I told the director “You obviously have a narcissistic pseudo-neurotic paranoia of anything that does not fit your myopic Procrustean paradigm.” Thank God for higher education. No wonder colleges are packed. What if there was a language designed not to put down or control each other, but nurture and release each other to grow? What if you could develop a consciousness of expressing your feelings and needs fully and completely without having any intention of blaming, attacking, intimidating, begging, punishing, coercing or disrespecting the other person? What if there was a language that kept us focused in the present, and prevented us from speaking like moralistic mini-gods? There is: The name of one such language is Nonviolent Communication. Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication provides a wealth of simple principles and effective techniques to maintain a laser focus on the human heart and innocent child within the other person, even when they have lost contact with that part of themselves. You know how it is when you are hurt or scared: suddenly you become cold and critical, or aloof and analytical. Would it not be wonderful if someone could see through the mask, and warmly meet your need for understanding or reassurance? What I am presenting are some tools for staying locked onto the other person’s humanness, even when they have become an alien monster. Remember that episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk was turned into a Klingon, and Bones was freaking out? (I felt sorry for Bones because I’ve had friends turn into Cling-ons too.) But then Spock, in his cool, Vulcan way, performed a mind meld to determine that James T. Kirk was trapped inside the alien form. And finally Scotty was able to put some dilithium crystals into his phaser and destroy the alien cloaking device, freeing the captain from his Klingon form. Oh, how I wish that, in my youth or childhood,

We had no problems, no conflicts,” Mars500 Commander Sergei Ryazansky is saying.

Tragedy! You finally make it to camp alive – only to discover that you forgot your toothbrush! You could Iris-message your mortal parent for a new one. But do you really want to walk around with drakon breath until it arrives? Instead, hit the camp store! While you’re there, be sure to check out the latest line of wind chimes – available in Celestial bronze, silver and seashell – perfect for interpreting the voices of prophecy-spouting trees! If hanging bling in branches isn’t your thing, how about the new Mythomagic expansion pack, Dual Deity Duel? The cards feature holographic images that change the gods’ aspects from Greek to Roman and back. He’s Ares! No, he’s Mars! No, he’s Ares again! Hours of dizzying head-to-head play! From tees to totes, whatever your needs, the camp store is your perfect one-stop shop.

THE SHEER COMPLEXITY OF PLUTO The diversity of phenomena seen on Pluto was far beyond what anyone, even New Horizons team members, expected to find on such a small planet so cold and far from the Sun. Ground fogs, high-altitude hazes, possible clouds, canyons, towering mountains, faults, polar caps, apparent dune fields, suspected ice volcanoes, glaciers, evidence for flowing (and even standing) liquids in the past, and more. This little red planet perched 3 billion miles away in the Kuiper Belt packed more punch than any other known small world explored, and indeed more punch than many much larger worlds. The variety of terrains, its complex interactions between the surface and the atmosphere, and the wide range of surface ages even prompted the New Horizons team to adopt the slogan “Pluto is the new Mars.

Eyes blazing with desire, he said, "Tell me. Tell me what you want." "You know what I want." "Say it." "I want you to make love to me. Here, now." He growled low in his throat as he lowered her to the rug in front of the hearth. His hands made short work of getting rid of her clothing and then his own. Soft sounds of delight rose in her throat as she ran her hands over him. In spite of the scars that marred his chest, he was very beautiful, each muscle sharply defined as though sculpted by an artist's hand. His skin was cool beneath her questing fingertips as she explored the width of his shoulders, his six-pack abs, the long, ridged scar that ran the length of his back.

A meteoroid is a bit of debris, usually planetary, hurtling through the solar system. If it's bigger than a boulder, than it's an asteroid. If any part of a meteroid makes it to Earth intact rather than burning up as it barrels through Earth's atmosphere, then it's a meteorite. A meteoroid's visible path through the atmosphere is a meteor. An astronaut struck by a meteoroid is a goner. A meteroid the size of a tomato seed can pierce a space suit.

Stay Behind (The Sonnet) While mine owners' kids are packing, Their mittens to colonize Mars, How about you stay behind, To give light as an earthly human star! I am not here to teach you how to code, I am here to show you why code. I am not here to teach you science, But to humanize the scientific road. Okay if they don't know the role of science, You for one, don't walk in their dirtsteps. You are wise, brave, and above all, human, Be the practitioner of humanitarian science. Science is superpower, always use it wisely. Little science does much harm if used recklessly.

Our watches are not ordinary timepieces, sir," explained Tom. "They are specially constructed for use in space travel. Each watch is electrically controlled and highly sensitive." "Electric?" repeated Logan in amazement. "Electric wrist watches? That small thing?" Tom smiled. "Each is charged by a miniature power pack, sir.

(When I get back to my room to review my notes, I find that I’ve written nothing of substance. I wasn’t so much taking notes as testing my Fisher Space Pen. My notes say: “WOO” and “yippee.”)

Zero gravity is part of the reason NASA price tags seem so extravagant. For every new piece of equipment that goes up on a mission—every pump, fan, throttle, widget—a prototype must be flown on the C-9 to be sure it works in weightlessness.

Dead people make NASA uncomfortable. They don’t use the word cadaver in their documents and publications, preferring the new euphemism postmortem human subject (or, yet more cagily, PMHS).

The astronaut was the three-year-old chimpanzee called Ham. (Dittmer was Ham’s trainer.) Ham was more than just the first space capsule landing mishap, of course. He was the first American to ride a capsule into space and come back down alive. As such, he put a bit of a tarnish on the Mercury astronauts’ considerable shine. Ham’s much-publicized flight made it clear to all: The astronaut doesn’t fly the capsule; the capsule flies the astronaut. Along with fellow astrochimp Enos, who orbited Earth three months before John Glenn, Ham was the embodiment of a debate that persists to this day: Are astronauts necessary?

‏"Let me tell you something about wolves, child. When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.

Could those sound waves shake apart your organs? NASA did testing on this back in the sixties, to be sure, as one infrasound expert told me, “that they didn’t deliver jam to the moon.” Bolte’s

(The Soviet space agency did not traditionally give cosmonauts steak and eggs before launch; it gave them a one-liter enema.) Fahey,

Only in space do you understand what incredible happiness it is just to walk. To walk on Earth" -Aleksandr Laveykin

I follow Sevro to Cassius’s room. The door is open. I feel anger toward Sevro for violating Cassius’s sanctum, but then I see the cramped room into which Cassius fit his huge life. On one wall his childhood, filled with moving pictures of Eagle Rest, Julian, his father, his brothers, his sisters, even his mother—all curly-haired and smiling. There are a few swordsmanship badges and mementos whose meaning will never now be known. A purple stone with flecks of gold. A chunk of metal the size of an apple. A carved length of wood. A large knife with an eagle-shaped pommel. On another wall hangs a House Mars pendant, surrounded by printed news clippings of my pack. Not just me, but Sevro, Screwface, Clown, Pebble, Virginia, even Pax. They are all happy moments, and it makes me sad that he couldn’t be there to share them with us. On the third wall are images of Lysander, Pytha, and Cassius through the years. But it’s the holoprojector that makes me stare. A loch floats in the air filled with two shivering boys while a wolflike creature slinks around its edges.

Jim Lovell seemed to do most of his displacing on the Gemini VII nutritionist. “Note to Dr. Chance,” says Lovell to Mission Control at one point in the mission transcript. “It looks like we’re in a snow storm with crumbs from the beef sandwiches. At 300 dollars a meal! I think you can do better than this.” Seven hours later, he gets back on the mic: “Another memo to Dr. Chance: Chicken with vegetables, Serial Number FC680, neck is almost sealed shut. You can’t even squeeze it out…. Continuing same memo to Dr. Chance: Just opened the seals; chicken with vegetables all over window at this time.

Space doesn’t just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.

The reactions of the talking heads of Earth security forces ran the gamut from calm, rational discussion of preemptive defense to foaming-at-the-mouth denunciations of Mars as a pack of baby-raping animals.