Books

I just finished a book called “Rocket Men” and it was pretty good. I would describe it as a wonderful jumble of anecdotes.. and I do mean jumble. I like it, I really do, but it is completely schizophrenic. The author jumps wildly as he describes various parts of the program, the astronauts and the hardware of Apollo. Seriously, I think the author fell into a synclastic infundibulum in the 60s and just started writing. (Any Vonnegut fans out there?) Anyway, it was still good and I finished it because I’m determined to start finishing books. My former self may not have. He did do a good job of finding quotes from Neil and Buzz. It was amazing to read how they described the lunar dust as smelling like ashes from a freshly put out fire and how the lunar module jolted and bucked while it guided itself to lunar orbit. There are many more anecdotes like that that made it worth it. Overall the book helps to answer that question that we all ask but NEVER get a good answer from astronauts… what did it feel like to go up into space?
It was good to read a book glorifying space travel for a change. The press seems to be so negative about it lately, or I might just be sensitive about it. The thing about space travel is that it forces us to build basically perfect machines. Nothing else does this. Our cars are very reliable but if they break it is no big deal, we pull over and call a tow. Planes however are manufactured to a much higher tolerance and have much more redundancy. They simply have to be made better. The parts are looked at through x ray machines and tolerances are phenomenal. This is because if a plane breaks you are in trouble, you’ll have to land or you might die. Now spaceships are yet a whole other level. They are incredibly expensive because they are much more complex AND they have to be for all definitions perfect. If it breaks, then you almost certainly die. The outcome is hardware that is only beat in perfection by nature herself. Like some unnamed government official said during the launch of Apollo 11, if just a sliver of this engineering perfection makes its way into the industrial sector, it will have paid for itself. If that is not a practical reason for a spaceflight program, an R&D program that produces historic achievements, I don’t know what is.
All that being said I’m not in it for the practical reasons.

I've started a few more books including a cooking book by Alton Brown. It's awesome. He describes EVERYTHING about cooking. How does frying "work" on the food? What really happens when you cook meat? And how can you use all of this knowledge to become a master chef. It's the difference between just doing a recipe and understanding how that recipe came to be. It is for the curious.