Ken Murphy / 6:27 pm January 24th, 2009

Ask what you can do for our space future.

Recently liberated from the corporate machine of CNN, long-time space reporter Miles O’Brien has an op-ed in the latest Space News entitled “We Aimed for The Stars…Until We Stopped”.

It serves as a sort of rallying cry, calling upon the space community to proselytize the importance of space to American society and do more to make people aware of why we need to be a leader in this field. Towards the end of the article he notes:

“We can do the same — in our own ways. But it means you have to get outside your cushy knothole and start proselytizing. The rotary club is fine. Start a blog. Call into a radio station. Send a letter to the editor. Give some tours of the cool places where you work. Get someone in to see a launch. Visit a classroom. It doesn’t matter, just do something to make people outside your world appreciate all that we have come to take for granted.”

These words really struck home, as I’ve been spending the morning inscribing the phrase “A gift to the Frontiers of Flight Museum from the National Space Society of North Texas for all the children of the metroplex” in about 50 books that NSS-NT is donating to the FoF’s children’s play area, where they have a bookshelf shaped like an airplane. When kids get tired of running around, they can sit down for a spell with a good space book to exercise their minds a bit.

This is one of two projects that I got started at NSS-NT, the other being the Santa Space Toy Drive that I wrote about previously. We are also working with a local elementary school to put together a special space program that will involve an ISS mock-up in the library and several displays. We also do numerous outreach and education displays at local museums throughout the year, our most recent being a huge display and a series of space lectures the weekend after Thanksgiving at The Science Place in Fair Park. I did the Moon lecture, of course, a re-hash of the talk I gave to the Texas Astronomical Society (pdf) a while back (I’m on pp. 15-16).

It’s interesting that he mentions Rotary, as it was through Junior Rotary, specifically the Rotaract Club at the UN, that I got started on my space adventure. Rather than giving a lecture at a rubber-chicken lunch, I was involved in organizing volunteers for the NYCitywide Model United Nations each year, where NYC schoolkids were brought into the UN to play delegates and debate such weighty matters as the problem of landmines, Human Rights & the Child, and in 1999, the UN Outer Space Treaties, for which I prepared the briefing paper for the students. That led me to the Space Generation Forum in Vienna for UNISPACE III, which led me ISU, which got me to NASA Academy, and so on. And now I have a space blog.

Maybe us younger folks are just more interested in doing than talking. I know I derive much more satisfaction from a park or school clean-up than in a letter to the editor. Seriously, gathering together with 10,000 other folks in Bryant Square Park before fanning out across the city to do good work is just an amazingly cool experience.

Shortly after the VSE was announced, I did call in to the local classical music station and requested that they play Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune‘ (remember the feather dance from the movie ‘The Right Stuff’?), dedicated to our space program.

I guess my point is that there are many, many ways to be creative in ‘proselytizing’ space. Only you, gentle reader, know how you can make a contribution. It might be in none of the ways that have been noted, like spending a weekend a month at the local library reading space books for kids, or donating a few bucks to a local student space project. It might be in judging a local science fair, or counseling a scouting merit badge. You know what your gifts and skills are - are you willing to apply them in shaping the future?