One of the main reasons I’ve started this blog is that I haven’t done the very thing I prod our reporters about all the time – post a text version of our video packages.
Not that I don’t keep busy;-)
Anyway, here’s my riff off what I talked about on-air Friday, being a space nut since I was a little kid.
My father worked for Boeing, as an engineer. When my brothers and I moved to be with him and his new wife (our stepmom) in New Orleans, I had a vague idea what he worked on, and moreso after we moved to Cocoa, Florida, in 1966 (the year Gannett began a little paper there called Today, a forerunner of USA Today).
So he worked on the space program, and I probably told him I was proud of him as often as he told me he loved me – rarely if ever (such were father-son relationships in those pre-Donahue prehistoric days).
But I was a victim of bad timing in this obsession.
We moved to Florida after Gemini ended, left before Apollo really began – I was living there when a fire killed the three astronauts of Apollo 1 on the launchpad. I believe my father worked on the escape system (a guy wire of sorts) after that tragedy.
Then we moved to Kent, Wash., outside Seattle (where he went to work on the ill-fated SuperSonic Transport, or SST project). When man landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. I wasn’t glued to a TV set – I was on my Boy Scout troop’s 50-mile hike, from Stevens Pass to Snoqualmie Pass (a make-up hike for one called off a year earlier, because one of the Scouts got lost and a search ensued).
Those were the days long before VCRs, much less TiVos, so… of course I saw the grainy black-and-white footage later, over and over, but didn’t get to feel that palpable sense of fright and awe and inspiration most of the planet did.
Oh well.
I did follow closely every moon mission after that, had a long-lost (sigh) friend named Gene Tichy and we’d watch them together – he’d even use a rudimentary videotape system to record them.
So ever since, I’ve been thrilled by spaceflight and saddened by the periodic tragedies.
On Sunday afternoon, another nail-biter much like the super-successful Mars Rovers comes up, as the Phoenix Mars Lander is due to make the first try in 30-plus years at landing on Mars, not by bouncing inside a big ball of sorts, but using retrorockets.
And because it’s 432 million miles away, it’ll take 15 agonizing minutes for the signals to reach Earth and to know whether it made it, or crashed. NASA TV again will be watching for all of those pensive minutes, until the cheers erupt, or… no, the cheers erupt. Ya gotta believe.
This is my kind of reality show.
UPDATE: 5/25, 5:45 pm: It did it! Phoenix is on the Martian surface! I just added breaking news atop KTVZ.COM and sent out a breaking-news e-mail. And now – the first image from the surface! Yay!
Leave it to Barney 
