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The Space Party
If you’re lucky, one day you will throw a party of astronomical proportions.
Part 1: The Set Up
In college, I took GEO 5, taught by Brown University’s popular geoscience professor Jim Head. His lectures on the geology of the Moon and Mars were always interlaced with gripping tales from his days in the NASA lunar space program, and even if you weren’t into geology (or space), they were fun. One of Jim’s first jobs in the late ‘60s was being on the team that decided where, on the moon, the astronauts should go; and, what they’d do when they got there.
The walls of his office were delightfully cluttered with space memorabilia, USGS photos of the exploding Mount St. Helens, globes of a half-dozen celestial bodies, and a rare beer bottle collection that covered most surfaces.
One of his pet projects was an academic collaboration with the Vernadski Institute, the Russian space program’s scientific center. When I was in college, the US had been to the Moon, we had a lander on Mars but no American had seen the surface of Venus. All visual telescopes revealed was a smooth white cueball, a planet with sulfuric acid…