What is the origin/history of your current avatar?

Just curious.

"And I don't want to live with somebody's depression"

Do you recollect which launch it was? The husband worked on the program until the purge after Challenger; he maintained the comlink on that flight (but blessedly wasn't listening in).

Always crashing...

It looks like STS-107. 16 January 2003. Columbia's last mission. R.I.P.

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Sounds like you know a bit about the business. When Columbia crashed, my husband had an immediate intuition that something had happened to the leading edge of one of the wings; he'd been in tile maintenance before they'd moved him to telemetry. It took weeks to confirm his hunch.

He's got an uncle who's doing some freelance for JPL lately; I've got to ask him about the force field they're using to protect the place from the fires.

Always crashing...

I've been a hardcore space freak since the Mercury days. I have a NASA cap autographed by my good friend (OK, I met him once) Dr F. Story Musgrave.

The recent moon landing anniversary has brought it all back with Discovery channel and the like having a major space fest these last couple of months.

The quality of that animated gif is not great, so I can't be certain that it is STS-107, but it kinda looks like this picture (which is):



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I remember staying up late for Mr. Armstrong's stroll on the moon. The husband got to hold a moon rock in his college days...he went into computers when he worked for Getty Oil as a geologist. That took him everywhere; NASA, The F22, The Human Genome Project...he almost got into Area 51 but Oracle Corp. couldn't close with the Air Force. It would have made his life.

Always crashing...

"The quality of that animated gif is not great, so I can't be certain that it is STS-107, but it kinda looks like this picture (which is): "


It does look like it.