Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Born too late to go to the moon

This might be the saddest thing I've read all day.

I told everybody that I was going to be a spaceman when I grew up (the word "astronaut" being some years in the future) and most of them laughed. Uncle Harry, who had no children and so treated them as adults with limited experience, said he believed I would do it, and asked me to bring him a rock from the Moon. Nobody knew that I wouldn't go to the Moon because I had been born too late. The first men who orbited and landed on the Moon fought in WWII and Korea, and associated combat with the smell of a rubber face mask and cold oxygen, not humid jungle and the nightmare reek of rotting flesh.

from An Autobiographical Ramble by Joe Haldeman


It's been 36 years - I think it's past time we left LEO again.
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