My first memory of a space flight was of John Glenn's Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962. I was five years old, and my mother and I were housesitting in the Chicago suburbs, for some reason. To keep me occupied, she gave me a book called The Planets by Roy Gallant. It was a large format, glossy book with magnificent paintings of all the planets. I was thrilled and poured over the book all day, only peripherally hearing Walter Cronkite covering the flight in the background.

I also have a vague memory of jumping up and down on my bed in Newport, Rhode Island as Scott Carpenter took off on May 24, 1962 aboard Aurora 7, and sitting in our '55 Dodge in front of a laundromat four hours later as a group of tongue-tied radio announcers tried to prepare us for the imminent death announcement after Aurora 7 splashed down 250 miles off course and no one could find it. (It never came, of course.)

But I had forgotten all this stuff, so long ago and far away in my short past, when I awoke on March 23, 1965 to find Mom coiled fearfully in front of the TV.

"Is it the Russians?" I asked. We had just had a nuclear drill at school the day before.

"No. A space flight. Sit down." So I sat down and watched.

When did Champollion see his first hieroglyph? Roebling his first bridge? Audubon his first bird? These moments are easy to pinpoint but hard to explain. All I can say is that as I watched the orange erector arm slowly peel back to reveal Gemini-Titan 3 poised and gleaming in the early morning haze, I was shot through with a form of enthusiasm (Greek for "filled with God") that I had never felt before. Champollion, Roebling and Audubon were all about the same age as me when the enthusiasm hit. Beware of eight-year-olds who take an interest in something.

The talk coming from Gemini Launch Control made absolutely no sense to my mother, but to me it sounded like a second language that I had learned but never used. Hypergolic fuel! ECS! Retrorocket adapter! Rose Knot Victor! Each new word had the ring of polished pearl. Chet and David tried to explain all this to all us neophytes, but eventually shut up and let Paul Haney, the NASA public affairs officer, do the talking.

Finally, at 9:24 AM (6:24 for us poor souls on the left coast), a small spark appeared at the base of the Titan booster, accompanied by the screech of the two apocalyptic fuels annihilating each other. Clouds of smoke and steam billowed out the far side of the pad, and GT-3 rose majestically from the its nest. Mom covered her eyes, pleading "I can't look! Tell me if it blows up!" The booster curved out over the Atlantic, and Mom finally opened her eyes just as the first stage was jettisoned in a fearsome blaze of explosive bolts and ullage motors. Mom whimpered and left the room.

I was transfixed. I continued to watch, actually, until Grissom and Young were found floating far off course in the Atlantic almost six hours later. School had been forgotten. That I had decided to become an astronaut by then wasn't the half of it -- I wanted to know it all!

The next morning, again very early, Ranger 9 transmitted live pictures to earth as it plunged into Ptolemy crater on the moon, a vertiginous, numbing front-seat view of a 10,000 mph crash. Now I had two space programs to study, the manned flights and the various automated ships we had whirling around the solar system.

And study I did. I sent off to NASA for everything they could give me -- which turned out to be about 6 pounds of photos, charts and pamphlets. I lurked around the public library after school, checking out cartloads of books. In an amazingly short period of time I digested it all and proceeded, for the next 30 years, to regurgitate it all over my family and friends. "Did you know . . . " was the way I started every sentence, disclosing some unbelievably cool facts. No, they didn't know, or care to know, but they listened and offered encouragement and humored me no end. What else could they do?

Two months after GT-3, Gemini 4 was ready to go. I practiced my sick look for days, and had little trouble convincing Mom that I was at death's door the morning of June 3, 1965. McDivitt and White took off while I watched in my pajamas, laying on my back with my legs hooked up over the side of my bed in mimicry of the astronauts' position at liftoff, screaming "Go! Go!" at my ancient Zenith TV while Mom ducked into the kitchen to avoid seeing the huge fireball everyone expected sooner or later. On the third pass over the US, White got out of the ship and floated alongside for 20 minutes, the first US spacewalk. There was no video of the event (live TV from space didn't come along until Apollo 7), but the voice from outer space revealed the kid in Ed White. The Ed White in me flamed even brighter.

Soon after GT-4, my father got wind of an AIAA convention in San Francisco, which was going to be open to the public for a few hours on July 29, 1965. The place was packed when we arrived, and I spent the next three hours in a trance. Wow! Here was the McDonnell exhibit, the guys who built the Gemini! Here's a full-scale Apollo command module mockup! A lunar module!! They were both cheesy plywood, but I didn't care. Armed with a big plastic bag with a Ling-Tempco-Vought logo on it, I gathered up copies of every brochure, PR handout and photo I could find. I played a primitive video game at one booth, and won a button saying "I'm An Armchair Astronaut!" The highlight of the trip was the Mariner exhibit, which had an engineering prototype -- the real thing! -- of the Mariner 4 probe which had just passed by Mars two weeks earlier, snapping pictures of what later turned out to be the only part of Mars with no interesting features whatsoever. They also had a massive radio hookup to whatever deep space dish was tracking Mariner 4 at the moment, and a long stream of numbers from the spacecraft, out beyond Mars, were reeling forth from a teletype printer. Actual transmissions from Mariner! The operator gave me a piece of the readout, a 9-inch strip of paper with "628" printed in succession down the middle, with a few "627's" and "629's" thrown in, the lonely ship's plantive cry of "Hello? Hello?" I went home feeling sorry for the little guy out there in the void.

(More coming as soon as I can find the time to type it.)

I just wanted to take this opportunity to mark down in one place the names, already fading from our national memory, of those few astronauts who not only rode the beast into orbit, but who broke the shackles of Earth's gravity and arrogantly leaded off to what NASA prosaically calls "cislunar space." In all of human history, only these souls have left this place to go someplace else.

As you can see, Jim Lovell, John Young and Gene Cernan made the trip twice.

I'm waiting for someone to do a study of the Command Module Pilot Curse. As of 1999, all of the Apollo commanders except Shepard and Conrad are still alive. (Ol' Pete went out the way he lived, didn't he?  Wiping out on a Harley on the Pacific Coast Highway at the age of 69.) One LMP (Jim Irwin) has died. But four CMPs have shuffled off -- Eisele, Swigart, Roosa, and Evans. Your guess as to what this means is as good as mine.

Just as a personal aside, here are the names of all the astronauts I have seen in person.

• Mike Collins -- at the opening of the Air and Space Museum, Washington, July 1, 1976.
• Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, Buzz Aldrin, John Young, and Bob Crippen -- at a ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of the first moon landing, at the Air and Space Museum, Washington, July 20, 1979.
• Ken Mattingly -- In his role as Rear Admiral, Commander, Naval Space and Electronic Warfare Command, Washington, 1982.
• Neil Armstrong, Sally Ride, John Young, Bob Crippen, Hank Hartsfield, Paul Weitz -- at the Challenger accident hearings, Dean Acheson Auditorium, State Department, Washington, April 3, 1986. (I was supposed to be studying for my finals for my MBA at George Washington University down the street, but bagged it to check out the hearings. As I rounded the corner of 23rd Street, I almost ran over John Young, who was getting out of a cab with Bob Crippen to go into the building. I'd just like to say here that Young got a raw deal after Challenger, and the fact that he has defiantly stayed on as an active-duty astronaut (since 1962!) when NASA would dearly love to see him go is the kind of in-your-face-ism that I aspire to.)
• Jim Lovell -- at a book signing for Lost Moon, Air and Space Museum, Washington, October 17, 1994. (I shook his hand, and haven't washed it since.)

And a final note: I was honored recently to have a guestbook entry by Jack Roosa, the son of late Apollo 14 CMP Stu Roosa.

I enjoyed your website concerning the astronauts. My dad was the Command Module pilot on Apollo 14. I miss him. Thanks for considering the astronauts your "heroes". I do too!

Jack Roosa
Ft Leavenworth, KS USA - Saturday, November 08, 1997 at 21:14:44 (EST)

I was great to hear from you, Jack, and I'm sure your dad is up there shooting the shit with Gus and Deke and Al and Pete in the galactic version of Pancho's Happy Bottom Riding Club.

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