Road Trip and Mars Trip

Life is finally starting to get back to normal after a long trek on the road.  I did not post all the pictures from the road trip on the last post because the blog post was getting too long.  I thought I would share another photo today.  Next week I will have photos of the doll project.  I am woefully behind on that project, and really need to get going if I am going to meet the deadline for it.

Sorry if there are formatting issues.  Sometimes when I make a long post, the format messes up when I insert the pictures

I grew up during the space race and my childhood was filled with memories of things such as the test flights sending animals into space, John Glen's flight with its dramatic countdown and seeing people land on the moon.  There are many place names associated with the space program that draw may attention back to those days:  NASA, Cape Canaveral, Goddard Space Flight Center and Vandenberg Air Force Base.  The news focuses so much on the rockets taking off from Florida, that I sometimes forget how much of the space program is close-by.  I was reminded of mid-Atlantic states' role in the space program when we drove past a sign for the Goddard Space Center.  Goddard is in Maryland.  Virginia is home to a NASA site and a test site called Wallops Island.  Some days, when the weather is right and you can find a place without trees blocking the view, we can see a launch from Wallops Island.  Although it may sound  a little silly, I was delighted to get a photo of the Goddard Space Flight Center sign while we were on the road. 


I have also been fortunate enough to tour Cape Canaveral and tour inside the building where they house the rockets used in the space program.  I was even able to see the crawler that transported the rockets to the launch pad up close.  The rockets and crawlers were tremendous.  You just cannot get any idea of the size of these things from viewing them on television.

Given my history, you can probably guess that I have stayed interested in the current space programs.  I did not sign up to be an astronaut (no girls allowed then, strictly a boy's club).  I did not sign up for Elon Musk's Mars project (too old), so I did the next best thing, I sent my name to Mars.  The InSight spacecraft lifted off yesterday from Vandenberg Air Force Base on its mission to Mars.  My name, (along with many others) is inscribed on a memory card showing that I had an interest in the space program.  Six and a half months from now, the InSight spacecraft will land on Mars.  It may not seem like much, but at least my name arrived on Mars before anyone set foot on the place.  As my husband quipped this morning, "Someday someone's going to find that thing and say 'who are all these people?'".

I suspect that the program to send your name was really started to get children interested in space, but I am sure that many of the names that signed up are adults.  At any rate, when I signed up, they emailed back and they said I could download a virtual boarding pass and a virtual mission patch.  So for a family account for generations to come, here they are; pictures of my mission patch and boarding pass.

For the record, my name is also inscribed on a memory card for the Parker Solar Probe as well.  I don't expect anyone will be finding that memory card. 

Check back next Sunday afternoon for the latest update on my projects.