Is life getting too dicey here on the home planet? NASA is sending astronauts to explore the Moon and to build the foundation for the first manned crew missions to Mars.
How can ordinary people get off this rock? Is that doable? If you’re not capable of astronaut training, there’s another way. It’s the next best thing to flying to the moon.
NASA says that after registering, participants can download a collectible “boarding pass” affirming that their name will be aboard the mission’s Orion spacecraft. All of the names will be stored on a flash memory card, which will be added to the Artemis II Official Flight Kit. If you want your name to fly to the moon and back, here’s your chance.
There are other ways to be involved. If you wish to donate to the mission in a significant monetary way, you’ll get frequent flyer miles. Since the moon is almost a quarter of a million miles away, you may accumulate enough to purchase the country of Lichtenstein or be able to rent Balmoral Castle for a weekend bash. Even if NASA produces a larger rocket with more room for astronauts, the boarding lines could be worse than a grand opening at Trader Joes and it will be cramped with no beverage service.
Is there a chance for a flight to Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn? We have extremely fancy hardware floating around space and, in some cases, cruising on the surface of those planets. Science has taken us far, but we still have people who doubt the science. A shocking finding comes from a survey conducted by the National Science Foundation. The survey, done every two years, tests the public’s knowledge of basic facts in the physical and biological sciences.
It may have its roots in the heliocentric theory which positioned the sun as the center of the universe (It’s not) as many had believed. When the sun spews CME’s (Coronal Mass Ejections) at us and threatens our very usage of the cellphone as entertainment and diversion, we disavow its life-giving nurture and pull back to a simpler time in our lives when the words ‘Honey’ and ‘Boo Boo’ were separate and distinct.
We don’t wish to think of our sun as a celestial parent, angry at our transgressions and willing to punish us with a CME for example, for texting while driving or failing to pick up our dog’s leavings. I think the sun would punish us for a much worse transgression like posting pictures of our meals on Facebook.
We’d like to take the word of those who call themselves ‘scientists’ and hope they have graduated from a school that at least has the words ‘Institute’, ‘World’ and/or ‘Not a Diploma Mill’ in its title.
We’d like to believe what scientists, Astrophysicists and astronomers tell us, like the one about Pluto not really being a planet but a large rock in the Kuiper Belt. (Note to self: Thanks to Hubble Space Telescope’s discovery that Pluto has 5 orbiting moons there are astronomers that are pushing for it to be back as our 9th Planet) Don’t you want Pluto back, and aren’t you sorry you threw out that map of the Solar System when tiny Pluto was a spot so small, it looked like a speck of dust. It was: clean your room! Pluto is certainly the most adorable Planet with the best name as opposed to Uranus which has inexplicably been mis-pronounced by people who think it means something else.
NASA is currently planning some missions that will give us a better look than we’ve ever gotten at Uranus. Did you chuckle inwardly when you read that? Let’s step back for a moment and look at the Walter Cronkite and Alex Trebek pronunciation of the seventh planet from the Sun. They stressed the second syllable.  They’ve got more credibility on enunciation than any neo-news reader who mispronounces ‘Don Quixote’
