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.

Next Year Andromeda

Andromeda is the spiral galaxy 225 million light years away from our star system.

Four billion years from now the two galaxies are predicted to crash together.

None of that will be there to witness that event.

When I was a kid in the 1950s, Marvel Comics came out with a story NEXT YEAR ANDROMEDA.

225 million light-years in one year means a vessel would have to cover over 60,000 light-years a day.

Is that possible?

Not with our technology.

This week Voyager 2 left the solar system.

The NASA space probe was launched in 1977

It has passed Jupiter.

Saturn.

Uranus.

Neptune.

And now into Deep Space.

Joining the other five vessel to achieve departure from the heliosphere.

Most people have no idea of this accomplishment.

Next year Andromeda.

Especially with Julie Chrystie.

The Stars Beyond Our Touch

The stars have obsessed Man throughout our existence on the planet. We have stared at the distant pinpoints of light and asked if anyone was out there. Our ancient ancestors thought the cosmos was the home of the gods, Christians prayed upward to heaven, and modern scientists have mapped the universe with telescopes. Our early ventures into Space were on the nose of rockets.

During the Cold War Russia and the USA raced into Space on those giant firecrackers.

Every rocket was launched in top secrecy and skeptics have continually accused NASA of faking the 1969 Landing on the Moon, but no one doubted the performance the US Space Shuttles blasting off from Cape Kennedy.

Since 1982 the manned spacecraft have lifted from this mortal coil.

Twice the missions ended in disaster. The Challenger exploded on take-off in 1986 and Columbia disintegrated on entry in 2003.

In 2009 the Atlantis lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center for the final space mission to the International Space Station.

335 astronauts have ridden the Shuttle into orbit. The fleet has clocked over 500,000,000 miles in that time. A long way for Man, but light travels the 93 million miles between the Sun and the Earth in a little more than 8 minutes, so Man is not ready for the stars and many of us stranded on the planet wonder about the future of NASA's space program, especially with NASA touting the efforts of Boeing and the Sierra Nevada Corporation to develop a cheaper version of the Space Shuttle. Several other ventures are financing the corporate race into Space. None are capable of producing a manned orbiter within this decade, leaving Mankind locked on Mother Earth.

The International Space Station will have to be supplied by Russian rockets until the replacement shuttles are ready for Space.

The GOP are hoping on never, because the religious right are convinced that the heavens are for the dead and not the living.

But I'm a Trekkie and Trekkies always believe that when the shit gets a foot high we step a foot higher.

And I believe in the old Space motto, "Next year Andromeda."

But just in case I'm ready to construct my own orbiter powered by two gallons of Mississippi moonshine attached to a lawn chair.

Total outlay $98.

Possible lift-off of 5 feet.

Yes, I do want to be a spaceman.