Throwing rocks

Hi kids!

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!