28 years old here, hooked since Neptune.

I guess I'm also one of the older ones here. I'm as old as the Nautilus and the H-bomb. (Sorry, couldn't find a suitable space-related reference.)

As old as Buck Rogers? Flash Gordon?

Family legend is that my mother held me up to watch the Apollo 11 landing on the ward's TV set, a few weeks after I was born. (Apparently I had jaundice so they'd kept me in for a few weeks.) I do IT security stuff at an Internet company. I've been aware of space since I was woken up to be shown the milky way (aged 6 or so)... then I remember staring for hours at the cover of an LP of "The Planets" with a lovely painting of the Apollo CM/SM heading out to the moon... but it was discovering a large-format atlas with gorgeous Mars landscapes from the Viking orbiters in the school library, and immediately recognising some landforms that we were learning about in geography, that really got me hooked. Come to think of it - funny, I'd forgotten this - for my geography A Level (the exams you do at age 18 in the UK) we had to submit some original coursework. Alas! My proposal on Martian analogues of terrestrial geological processes was rejected out of hand... a couple of weeks later they said no to Antarctica as well, and I ended up writing a load of piffle about the Severn Bridge in my first all-nighter. Ah me, miserable days...

That was my father's generation, Dan. He was born in 1924, and the first Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon books and comics began to appear around that time. He lived to see men on the Moon and space shuttles landing on runways like airplanes.

I do get some of my interest in space from my father. He was a pilot and a bombardier on B-17s back in WWII, and shared his love of flying with his sons. In fact, the only magazine my family got in the mail as I was growing up was "Flying." Dad watched the early Mercury flights with great interest, and my brother and I emulated him... that's one reason I remember things like Freedom 7, even though it happened when I was only five years old.

I can still remember, very clearly, the evening of July 20, 1969. My mother's parents were visiting that day, and as we waited in the family room for Neil Armstrong to crawl out of Eagle and step onto the Moon, Dad almost whispered "now, pay attention. This is the real thing -- this is history."

Yep -- I got to watch the first Moonwalk with my grandparents, who were both born before humans had flown in powered aircraft.

-the other Doug

Neat, Doug!

My dad influenced me as well. Although he was a baker (and a die-hard SF fan! ), the wide-open vision of our future in space in the 60s was so influential on him that he was convinced that it was vitally important for me & my brother to know about space from an early age to succeed and participate in what he thought would be our expansion beyond the Earth within our lifetimes. He bought all the wonderful "How & Why" books for us that he could, any space-related toys we could afford (my favs were a Revell Saturn V model we built together and some of the "Major Matt Mason: Moon Mission" figurines & things; anybody else remember those? )

Best gift of all was a large poster of the Solar System, mounted on a piece of cardboard so that he could convieniently display it and answer our questions when we would frequently ask to see it. with the planets listed at the bottom in descending order of size. I memorized the bloody thing before I was four years old, I swear, and can still recite the planets in order of size or number of moons as known in the mid-60s.

Pretty hard to go wrong by making space a magical concept for kids, I'd say. Didn't take with my brother, who may have actually been the inspiration for the idiom "down to earth" (no criticism, it's just who he is), but me...it gave me dreams, and an unbridled, utterly fascinated joy in seeing the new horizons that space exploration brings us. Can't imagine living without this interest, really.

...and I hope most of us who have children are continuing this tradition. One thing I like to do at the end of a busy day on a clear evening is to lie outside on a lounge chair and watch the skies for shooting stars and satellites. My oldest daughter (now 14) began joining me when she was about five and I took the opportunity to tell her about the cosmos and show her how to identify various stellar objects. She was on a week-long school trip to the mountains a few months ago and as they sat around the campfire she was showing them satellites and giving her own lesson on shooting stars and meteorites. One of the teachers refused to believe she knew all that and accused her of making up the bit about the tiny manmade objects creeping overhead. sighhhhh

But keep it up everyone, we owe it to our future generations to teach as we were taught. There aren't enough "Stu" types to go around so we need to pitch in and begin with our own.

Hi Dan! The same here! My youngest son will be 14 in another week and he loves sleeping outside looking for satelittes and shooting star.
Last night we had a bright pass of the ISS (-2.5 mag) and we were outside watching. Less than 15 minutes later, we watched the ingress inside Kibo and it was a lot of fun seen the very wild time they had. My son was very impressed by Reismann trick of been let without motion and far from Kibo's walls and then trying to get a hand on something : it took him about 1 minute. I do not believe my son will do a space job but nevertheless he told me : I want to do that!

BTW : I'm as old as the Other Doug

I'm as old as Viking 12. (Didn't know that until spurred to look it up by this thread.)

"The Viking rocket series of sounding rockets were designed and built by the Glenn L. Martin Company (now Lockheed-Martin) under the direction of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. A total of twelve Viking rockets flew from 1949 to 1955."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_rocket

I'm as old as Pioneer 11 ... one month older, in fact, but still sending signals, though not from as far away. Originally from Switzerland but have migrated to Australia. First memory is STS-1, got hooked by watching Giotto, saw Ulysses launch live at Cape Canaveral but interest faded in the 90s. All got reignited when my (then) 3 year old son got "addicted" to Discovery Channel's Extreme Machines: Rockets. Alter ego is as freelance translator, though I'd like to wind that back a bit if only I could make some money from "ground-based spaceflight".

Spin stabilized? What about energy source?

Doughnuts! My spin-stabilized energy source

STS-1 was my first "live launch"; I pulled my first ever sickie (from school) to watch it, little realising how habit forming it would be!

Hmmm. So I guess I can say I'm the same age as NASA -- we'll both be 50 this year, just a couple of months apart.

--Greg

I'm as old as the answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.