Up, Up, and Away...

When I was five or six years old, I wanted to be an astronaut.  Space:1999 was the coolest TV show ever in my book (yeah, well, the taste of a six year old is never to be underestimated).  I used to read, and re-read, articles on Apollo 17 and the Skylab missions in a couple of old National Geographic magazines.  Pop-Tarts never tasted so good as when eaten at 5 a.m. while watching the rockets launch for the Apollo-Soyuz mission.

Those were the waning days of America's outer space heroes, just a few years after Armstrong set foot on the moon.

Today, President Obama outlined a dream for sending astronauts to Mars and to the asteroids beyond, making up for his cancellation of President Bush's dream of sending men back to the moon and the Constellation project.