Next Year Andromeda

THe planet Earth is located on the farthest edge of the Milky Way Galaxy. The barred spiral of Andromeda is the closest galaxy to our Solar System crowded with over a trillion stars. The seemingly impossible distance between the two nebulae of approximately 2.57 ± 0.06 million light-years failed to deter Marvel Comics from publishing a cover spanned by NEXT YEAR ANDROMEDA and I dreamed of leaving my hometown on the South Shore to travel the stars.

The Space Race of the early 1960s intensified my desire and on summer nights I laid on the back lawn of our split-level reading MYSTERIES IN SPACE in the moonlight. I prayed for aliens to abduct me. While I saw the Sputnik crossing the sky, bats were the only silhouettes in the night and an unworldly Dracula never controlled their search for insects.

I researched the boundaries of the universe at the town library supplemented by comic books purchased with tip money from my paper boy route. They cost ten cents. My father considered them trash along with the Three Stooges. He was an electrical engineer and believed in the beauty of Math.

The 1962 film THREE STOOGES IN ORBIT didn't change his opinion of Moe, Larry, adn Curly Joe. His hatred for comics was manifested by ripping them out of my hands and tearing them to shreds.

> The USSR and USA battled on the edge of the Cosmos for an empire beyond Earth. "This not a time for frivolity." My father had served in the Army Air Force during WWII, testing radar in B-25s. The fatality rates at his Kentucky air base were around 20% and that was without anyone shooting at their aircrafts. I hid my comics under my mattress, but laid under the stars until the mid-60s.

July 20, 1969 US astronauts landed on the moon around 8:07 PM. I was at my girlfriend's house. We saw none of the it, lost in the aether of teenage love.

President Nixon saw little value in the Space Race since our country was fighting a war in Southeast Asia. NASA's budget shrunk by billions. Our only ventures into Outer Space were satellites.

Voyager 2 is now traveling more than 11.6 billion miles (18.8 billion km) from Earth and will transmit reading from the heliosphere until 2025.

Amazing, but some people still dream of Andromeda. Two weeks ago the Billionaire Bezos set off in the rocket to achieve the height of sixty-two miles, achieving weightlessness for a matter of minutes, before falling back to Earth like a used condom. No way in an atheist's hell with the Blue Origin ever break Terra's confines.

Amazon's autocrat was no spaceman.

Conversely Virgin's overlord Richard Branson launched from his New Mexican Spaceport a week before Bezos.

The VSS UNITY soared fifty miles above the planet surface and glided back the spaceport.

Style Yes. Class Yes. Speed. Not a chance.

The UNITY barely topped Mach 3 and all the fingers in the world could not calculate how long Branson's flying machine would take to reach Andromeda, so until humans invent space warp vessels, I will lie in my friends' backyards awaiting the elevating light to attain one with the universe. I could only be so lucky. THey'll get me to Andromeda.

One way or the other.