“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
It’s the question every American kid gets asked at least once in their lifetime, if not more (sometimes it’s not phrased as a question but a command). For some reason adults love torturing kids with such existential issues to consider when they’re still too young to ride the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.
Jason Lotz’s trip to the space camp in Huntsville, Ala. brought to mind my answer to the question when I was in preschool – an astronaut. Then, as now, outer space fascinated me. It was science, a subject that I could have gone without studying, but there was a mystery and awe of the unknown to it all.
It was also the natural explorer in me, as in all true red-blooded boys. To leave behind the Earth and enter into an entirely new, unexplored region of the universe, going hundreds of miles per hour, not knowing if you will ever make it back, offered a sense of adventure, an opportunity to see what existed beyond our knowledge.
Anything to get away from doing chores – kids today still do those, right?
I’m sure watching Empire Strikes Back repeatedly at my cousins’ house aided in providing me with creative ideas of what I’d find out there, in addition to cheesy 1950s illustrations of what life would be like on a Mars colony (incurable optimists, they were).
Admittedly, I got little impatient waiting until adulthood to take a stab at astronaut training and decided to create my own rocket ship, a la Jules Verne. Perhaps I should have paid more attention during science class, but apparently you’re limited in the distance you can travel without the aid of liquid oxygen, no matter how many layers of duct tape you wrap around it after repeated failed launches. I blame it on Newton for discovering gravity. He should have just left it where he found it.
I suppose I succeeded in one respect, though. Although I never managed to get so much as into the sub-stratosphere, my parents informed me that my mind seemed to be perpetually in outer space. One small step for man, one might say.
While my dreams of flying into space – where I probably would have pulled a Christopher Columbus and accidentally landed on another planet than the one I planned on – were never realized, I still maintained that interest in space exploration growing up. Homer Hickham’s “Rocket Boys” is one of my favorite books, and for science fair projects I launched model rockets, some of which may still be awaiting recovery in a random tree at Marymore Park. Whenever there’s a clear sky out at night, particularly in a rural area, I keep a copy of a book on constellations near at hand.
The truth is few people ever end up doing what they originally think they will when they proclaim it to their parents at four years old, but that doesn’t mean they have to lose interest in it.
TJ Martinell is a staff writer for the Kirkland Reporter newspaper.
