A Brief Pause From The Ordinary..., Demographics time--please just humor me Options

[nasaman58]

I just joined this community last night, and I'm just curious about some of the people here. I'm only 19 years old, but I'm more interested in all things space than anyone I've ever met. Just out of curiosity, what are people's ages in this forum?

[dvandorn]

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

[nprev]

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.

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.