When Angel Jen and I went to the space center tour they had this
simulator to show people what it feels like to be atop the rockets
when they take off.
You go into this simulator and they strap you into a seat. This is
supposedly a seat similar to a shuttle seat. They they show a movie
telling you what is going to happen. Then it happens. The room rotates
so you're horizontal, shakes like crazy while huge speakers blast you
with the sounds of takeoff. It was pretty crazy.
Here's a picture of me at the space center display of space suits.
Spacemen have to wear space suits because there's no air in outer
space. The suit provides the astronaut with air to breath and
protection from the heat, cold and vacuum of space. The suits cost
whoa-a-lotta bucks and are custom made for each astronaut.
If I was an astronaut and they made me go up after Labor Day, I would
have to get my suit in like a taupe at least. No one wears white after
Labor Day, geesh.
The helmits have cool mirrored visors so the astronaut can see you but
you can't see him. That's so the astonauts can make faces at people
without getting caught. They said it takes two hours for an astonauts
to get into the suit. Typical government workers you say? No it's
just that there are a lot of parts and everything has to be checked.
The next three parts of the space station to go up are called Raphael,
Donatello and Leonardo. They were built by the Italian Space Agency. I
have no idea if these people know that these are all also the names of
Mutant Ninja Turtles. It could be NASA is messing with their minds.
You be good kids, now, and hold still and let the teacher mess with
your minds!
Angel Jen and I went to the space center tour. Here's a picture of
Angel Jen with her official space center Badge of Admission. With
this badge comes the rights and duties of a space center visitor. Like
the right to look around and take pictures and the duty to learn and
remember space stuff.
One thing we learned was that it costs about a million bucks to put a
pound of stuff in space. Rockets ain't cheap, little buddies. And we
learned there will only be five more shuttle flights then the shuttles
will be retired. After that if you want to go into space you have to
hitch a ride on a Russian rocket.
And the man says all you guys should study math if you want to be NASA
people.
Angel Jen and I are in Cape Canaveral, Florida. That's where America
launches rockets into space. (Why here? Because the further south you
go, the faster your starting speed into orbit. On the equator
everything is traveling 1042 mph eastward. At the north pole, it's
zero mph. You little geometrists figure out the rotational speed for
Cape Canaveral at 28• north*)
We took time out from our adventure to go to the space center tour. On
the tour youget to see many things that are way cool. There are movies
about the space program. There are rockets. Not little model rockets.
Real, big actual rockets. Lots of them. Explanations of how they are
constructed. Space station modules. You get to see people working on
space station parts. Very cool. They trot youaround on a bus.
Several times when they tried to send people into space there was a
mess up and people died. Way back three guys were in a space capsule
when it caught on fire. That was caused by human stupidity. The
capsule was filled with pure oxygen which made it a death trap. Any
spark in pure oxygen will cause an uncontrolable fire in any
combustable material. Some electrical thing made a spark and those
guys were toast. Another time a shuttle blew up coming back from
space. Another time one blew up taking off.
The NASA people built a memorial to all these people who died trying
to go up in space. The memorial is a plaza overlooking a pool and a
big wall of black granite with the dead people's names on it.
We went to the memorial and there in the pool was an alligator! This
was the first alligator we had seen. He was one lazy alligator. There
were fish right in front of his nose but he was too lazy to eat them.
Or maybe he just likes to snag people that come to the memorial.
One of the tour bus drivers said there were 6000 alligators on the
Nasa property (which is really big, like miles across). We saw a bunch
more sunning themselves when we rode the buses.
Here's a pictue of the man eating alligator in the pool built as a
memorial to dead people. Have the teacher explain the meaning of
'irony' to you.
*that's right kids! You who calculated the initial eastward velocity
at 28• n as 920 mph, the cosine of 28• times 1042, kudos! The rest
of you, I expect better next time.
Well, after sailing sixty miles yesterday it felt good to sit still in
a marina. It was finally warm enough to enjoy the whole day outside.
And I finally got a shower. After sleeping in my clothes under five
blankets to stay warm for days it felt really good to get hosed down
and get some of the bugs off. We did laundry and dried out the boat by
opening the portholes (windows) and lockers (little things like
closets where we store stuff). One thing about cold weather like that
is condensation. As the astute young thermodynamicists among you
already know, if you cool moist air, water condenses. That's what
makes the outside of a glass of ice water get wet. It also makes the
inside walls of a cold boat wet because people breathing makes
moisture and the cold walls condense it. This is the truth. You can
ask the teacher if you don't believe me.
The marina has a line of trees along one side. The trees are like half
white. I'm like, "Weird."
Then I found out why. In the late afternoon the trees filled up with
roosting cormorants. A cormorant is a bird that likes to eat fish.
They don't pluck fish from the surface like an eagle or osprey. They
dive into the water, swim underwater and chase the fish down on their
own turf. In the process they get really wet. Eventually they get
soaked and have to go hang out in the sun to dry out. We have
cormorants in Maine and I used to see them there all the time but they
hung out in the sun on rocks a few at a time. These guys all gather at
end of day and roost in trees by the hundreds. That's what makes the
trees white. Bird doo doo from hundreds of birds day after day.
The birds land in the trees and the boss birds get the top branches.
If a boss bird sees a less boss bird on a high branch he comes in and
knocks the less boss bird off the branch by yelling at him then biting
him with his beak and whacking him with his wings. The less boss bird
sometimes gets knocked literally out of the tree and winds up flapping
and flopping right down into the water below, squawking all the way
down. This is called "the pecking order" among birds. Boss birds peck
less boss birds, who peck even less boss birds and so on.
This also happens in corporations, academia, politics and prison
populations. And grade schools to some extent, as I'm sure you know by
this point.
Well, kids, be good, study your thermodynamics and remember who's the
top of your pecking order-THE TEACHER!
We sailed south to Merritt Island as I promised. This island is part
of Florida and is next to Cape Canaveral where your bigbenevolent
federal government has spent just oodles of money building a place to
launch rockets and send stuff into space. They built the biggest
building in the world to house the rockets being prepared for launch.
And they built all kinds of launch pads for all kinds of rockets.
Building rockets and throwing satellites into orbit is the big boys'
equivalent of little boys seeing who can throw a rock the farthest or
the best. These big boys make their satellites by digging up rocks
they call ore, making aluminum, steel, copper and so on out of them,
using that to make satellites then throwing them into orbit with
rockets.
One time they threw a satellite so far and so hard that it went out of
orbit, past the moon, past mars, Jupiter and all the rest of the
planets and right on out of our solar system. This satellite was
caller 'Voyager'. The scientists put messages in the satellite for any
spacemen who might find the satellite some day. Carl Sagan, an
astronomer, was in charge of choosing the messages. He put in
mathematical stuff, pictures of people, the earth, our sun and solar
system, recordings of earth sounds and music. One of the pieces of
music was Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Good choice, huh?
The chance of space people ever finding this message is as close to
zero as it could ever get, but, man, would I ever like to be watching
the space man's face when he finds it!
Here's a picture of Angel Jen napping in the cockpit as we sailed
south to Cape Canaveral today.
Be good kids and see if you can get teacher to play some Beethoven for
you. That Beethoven could write some music!
Well, FINALLY we are on the move again. After Christmas, Florida got
so cold we pretty much had to stay where we were, hunker down and wait
for the weather to change. If we had tried to sail when it was so
cold we would have been frozen by the time the day was out. As it was
we had to sleep under five blankets with our clothes on then spend the
morning under blankets on the couch with our toes under one another's
legs.
How cold was it? About twenty degrees colder than normal. That's like
having two weeks of below zero weather in Camptown. Woof!
It was still freezing this morning but by noon it was almost fifty
degrees so we pulled up our anchor and drove down the waterway to
Ponce de Leon Inlet near New Smyrna Beach. Ponce de Leon was this
crazy Spanish guy from way back. He sailed to the island of Santo
Domingo with Christpher Columbus on Columbus' second voyage to the New
World. When Columbus went back to Spain, Ponce stayed. He went
exploring. He went to the Bahamas. The Indians there got sick of him
pretty quick. They told him there was a place with a fountain to the
west and if people drank from the fountain they stayed young forever!
He's like,"Dude! Where? I gotta find that thing!"
They were like, "Over that way. If you don't find it, just keep going.
You'll get there!"
So Ponce took off. The Indians said,"Man, we thought that guy would
NEVER leave."
He ran into North America, thought it was an island, claimed it in the
name of Spain and named it Florida. Florida, in Spanish, means "Land
of Flowers". He kept going south looking for the fountain but he
never found it. He sailed all the way to the keys, and returned
defeated to Santo Domingo. Five years later he came back to Florida to
look again. Some Indians decided this guy has to go, shot him with an
arrow and that was the end of him. Some people just never know when
they are wanted.
Nowadays, lots of old Americans come to Florida. They don't find the
fountain of youth, either, but at least it's warm. USUALLY warm.
Now we have to figure out where to go next. Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I
love ya, tomorrow!
Here's a picture of Angel Jen looking at her maps, planning for
tomorrow as the New Smyrna water taxi goes by.
See ya, kids! Stay warm.
I'm sorry we haven't posted more updates for you guys recently. We are
in Daytona Beach, Florida. After Christmas we came back to our boat.
The weather in Florida turned cold. Colder for longer than it had ever
been. The temperatures are twenty degrees below normal and have stayed
that way ever since.
We left from Maine in September. Maine is the farthest north state on
the east coast. North places are usually colder. We sailed and sailed
to get south because south places are supposed to be warm. But for the
last few days it has been colder here in the morning than in Maine
where we came from! I found that out on the Internet. The fine people
of the federal government put buoys in the ocean to measure waves,
temperature and wind. You can get the information from the buoys on
the Internet. Try this link, for example:
http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=41010
We have to decide where to go next. If you carefully examine your
globes you will discover that sailing from Maine to Florida is only
halfway to the islands of the Caribbean. We could just go further
south in Florida and hope for warmer weather. Or we could sail east
from here, then south to the islands. Doing that would require great
courage because it would be a trip of over a thousand miles on the
open ocean. Do you know how far a thousand miles is? It's a heck of a
long way, little buddies, I can tell ya that.
I suspect we will ponder a while then, at the last minute think of an
excuse to go south in Florida. At least for a while.
I want to go to the US Virgin Islands somehow. I hope we make it.
Be good children and tell us what you think we should do. Play it safe
or head off shore? Hmmm....
Welcome back from your vacation! Angel Jen and I finally, FINALLY got
someplace warm. We spent our Christmas at my sister Julie's. She lives
in Florida near here. She came over, picked us up in her car and took
us to her place. She and I come from a family of six kids. She has
lived in Florida for 33 years. Jen and I Are the first family to visit
her in florida for Xmas In all that time. It made her happy.
Remember, little friends, you can make other people happy with the
least little thing. Visit a sick friend or far flung lost family
member. Just being there counts for everything.
Here's a picture of angel jen. She's wearing her new christmas shirt.
Isn't she beautiful? I think she is. She's the best woman in the
world, as far as I'm concerned.
Be strong, little friends. Be good. And always ALWAYS do what the
teacher says. Remember: she's gotcha in height, weight and reach.
