To Infinity and Beyond !!

How's your summer going?

My “little brother” turns 53 next week and I remember the summer he was born vividly because he showed up about two weeks after the Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon.

The moon landing was BY FAR the biggest event of my 5-year-old summer. I even “officially” changed my favorite number from 5 to 11 because of it.

Like any red-blooded American kid, I was obsessed with astronauts riding that rocket into space and landing on the moon. I watched from blastoff to splashdown on our black and white TV (which always needed a minute to “warm up”). I had photos of the astronauts on my wall. I had my own space helmet and a toybox full of ray guns and space toys, so I was fully invested.

As a little kid, I had not an inkling of the politics of the “space race” or the decades of planning it took to get to the moon. I just thought the people at NASA sort of said “hey...let’s go to the moon” the way we kids said “hey... let’s ride our bikes to Belvedere Dairy” (the ice cream place 3 blocks away). Come on, I was 5, give me a pint-sized break here.

Every single team member at NASA had to be?absolutely?sure that if anything went awry, there was a plan and a backup plan for handling it – and things certainly did go awry. Did you know…

• that their “tranquil” and smooth landing site was strewn with Volkswagen-sized boulders that nobody knew about until seconds before landing?
• that the landing modules’ computer shut down and rebooted 5 times during descent and the LM had less than 15 seconds of fuel left when it landed?
• that on the way there and back, the rocket was only on course about one quarter of the time, meaning that most of the way, the astronauts were fighting just to get back on course?

Fast-forward 53 years (admittedly, the rest of this is nowhere near as cool)…

I just finished a project where the objective was to analyze a very complex deal and my job was to figure out if it was doable, feasible, and most importantly structured fairly so it wouldn’t get anyone into trouble down the road when someone invariably stands up and says “hey, that’s not fair, he got more than I did!” That’s a complaint you’d hear as loudly at Belvedere Dairy in 1969 as in a boardroom in 2022 – we really haven’t grown up all that much, have we?

But I digress…

The point is that this analysis and report had pages and pages of discussion and lots and lots of numbers and charts, which will probably never be read – and that’s kind of the idea. If someone takes the time to delve into it, it means that someone got really mad and if that happens, it had BETTER be right.

In other words, you may not need it but if you do need it, you?REALLY?need it.

I feel like one of those mission control people keeping an eye on the CO2 level or mixing up a pitcher of Tang. Yeah, I don’t get to fly the rocket or ride in the tickertape parade but I’m part of a team, without which the deal doesn’t get done.

And that’s “A-OK” with me.

And now, some words of wisdom from people who aren’t me:

• “The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you”.?-?Neil deGrasse Tyson
• “Great things are done by a series of small things brought together”.?– Vincent VanGogh
• “As someone who flew two space capsules and twice landed in the ocean, I can attest from personal experience how much logistics work is needed to get you home.”?–?Buzz Aldrin

Be good and be well.