Goodbye to an era: voice of "The Right Stuff" passes

A man who lived in my state in recent years, and who was the voice of the early NASA broadcasts has died.

Paul Haney, who was known as the "voice of NASA's Mission Control" for his live televised reports during the early years of the space program, died last Thursday of cancer at a nursing home in Alamogordo. He was 80.

Haney became NASA's information officer in 1958, only three months after the agency was formed. Haney pioneered a real-time system of reporting events as they happened in the first manned flight program, Project Mercury. In 1962 he became the public affairs officer of the Office of Manned Space Flight and moved to Houston to work in what is now Johnson Space Center.

Later he went on to manage information from the Gemini and Apollo flight programs. During those early years, Haney worked in the Mission Control Center, where he broadcast live to television viewers, and the news media covering launches. If you are old enough to remember watching the Mercury flights on television in your high school cafeteria when they used to let classes out because of the importance of those events, then you have heard Paul Haney's voice.

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I have a thirst for new knowledge and am constantly searching. Not all that I come across is worthy of taking up brain-cell space. Here is some interesting (and not-so-interesting) information in my travels around the internet; things you simply MUST be aware of...

There are 200 million Blogs which are no longer being undated (3 years ago)

More than one in eight people in US shows signs of addiction to the internet (how could you know something like that?)

Fathers tend to determine the height of their child. Mother’s tend to determine the weight. (I doubt that. Unless you are talking about parental supervision and not genetics)

Panspermia is the idea that life on Earth originated on another planet (for scrabble players, no?)

The Mona Lisa used to hang on the wall of Napoleon’s bedroom (but then, Napoleon use to sleep in the Louvre, right?)

Barbie’s full name is Barbie Millicent Roberts (I'm trying really hard to think of something I care less about. Nope.)

Cows can have regional accents according to a Professor of phonetics. (Who wants to bet me that he got a grant from the U.S. Government to study that crap?)

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Photo credit: The New Mexico Museum of Space History, Alamogordo.

Still making a difference... people you once knew but have probably forgotten: Where are they now?

Sally Ride, Ph.D., professor of physics (Space Sciences) at the University of California at San Diego (currently on leave and running her own company.) Her interest is encouraging elementary school students to study science, and her company Sally Ride Science (which she founded in 2001) creates entertaining science programs and publications for upper elementary and middle school students, with a particular focus on girls.

"There were a lot of preconceptions back then. I think that, whether in sports or whether in career choice, there were definitely preconceptions that girls didn't participate in sports other than swimming and tennis and golf. They probably didn't like them, or they would probably get hurt playing them or something, and that women didn't go on to become lawyers or doctors, much less scientists or engineers, and my parents, I think, were unusual in that they didn't hold those preconceptions.

"... History and English were difficult for me, science and math were easy. I was a quiet kid when I was growing up, and so I didn't really like to be called on in class. I think that my most stressful moments were probably sitting in class, huddled down, hoping that the teacher didn't notice me and call on me. Whether I knew the answer or not, that was irrelevant."

[Doctor Ride was the first American woman in outer space. (1983, aboard Challenger; and again in 1984, also on Challenger.) She has over 343 cummulative hours in space.]

Fun facts about Sally:

1. She answered a NASA advertisement for astronauts, along with over 8,000 other people. They picked her.

2. Her doctorate is in Astrophysics. She is smarter than even Relax Max.

3. She dropped out of college at Swarthmore to pursue a career in professional tennis. It took her 4 months to realize her mistake.

4. She helped design the mechanical arm on the space shuttle which puts satellites into space.

5. She served on the investigating boards of both the Challenger and Colombia disasters.

6, She has written 5 books for children on the subject of space exploration.