Comments on: Memories of the Space Age

By: Heresiarch

Heresiarch — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 01:14:48 +0000

Treat yourself to a voyage into Dr. Leary’s Exo-Psychology recontextualized, a refinement of Dr. Leary's extraterrestrial psychology.

By: John

John — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:30:59 +0000

Ha!…thanks. I had more hair then. And that’s the coolest I ever managed to look in a photo at that age.

By: Thombeau

Thombeau — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:38:54 +0000

Oh, a cutie even then!

By: John

John — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:07:20 +0000

The thing now is to make a really enormous amount of money so you can book a flight on Virgin Galactic. "Tickets cost $200,000 and deposits start from $20,000." Considering the cost has previously been in the tens of millions, that seems quite reasonable.

By: Nathalie

Nathalie — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 09:37:03 +0000

I might never applied to work at the European Space Agency if it had not been for such childhood memories.
I have not quite recovered from the deception of not being able to become an astronaut.

By: John

John — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:40:49 +0000

Hi Beest, and thanks. I spotted the match but in my haste to finish this piece didn't consider the bottle-rocket thing. That picture reminds me of Magritte, Memory in particular. I remain, of course, eternally jealous of anyone who's seen a Saturn V launch.

By: Beest

Beest — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:08:41 +0000

I grew up at roughly the same time, and I actually lived in Florida fairly near Cape (at that time) Kennedy. I could see the rockets going up in the distance!

On the cover of the International Times you show, I think what is happening is not an “exploding coke bottle,” but what we used to call a “pop-bottle rocket,” a small firework on a stick, that is shot out of empty drink bottles (or in our case, as I recall, from our hands). The burnt match in the illustration would seem to bear this out.