Reflections on my Birthday, TIME for Kids and Space

My birthday cake (taken by my son Yotam)

It's my birthday today. Nothing round or big, just a solid 38. Waking up on ones' birthday means growing up one day like any other, but becoming one year older has significance far more than that one extra day. The kid in me has a hard time relating to the chum in the mirror with white hairs popping everywhere on his head and face, almost expecting to still see a younger self.

Space is serious business. Many challenges, many triumphs, also tragedies. For me and kids of all ages it's a source of inspiration, even a way to keep the child in me alive. Watching the shuttle launch last year left me, if only for a short time with the uninhibited worry-free joy of a young child getting a balloon. Yes, it takes a lot more to induce this feeling when you've matured beyond balloons and lollipops, but that feeling is still there, waiting to be cultivated and nurtured. TIME for Kids, a TIME magazine for the younger crowd, helps inspiring the next generation.

Exodus Story Telling - Egypt and Earth Gravity

Story telling is an art. Captivating an audience by telling a story pivots on how the story is told no less than the story being told. Passover Seder ("Seder" means order in Hebrew) is a very effective way of perpetuating the story about exodus, going out of a known situation into the unknown called freedom. The paradigm is so effective, in fact, that its structure was borrowed to commemorate another story about another pseudo-exodus - getting free of Earth gravity for the first time and traveling to the unknown of space.

Yuri Gagarin - Legend in 1961, Dead in 1968

Everyone interested in space knows how Yuri Gagarin became an instant legend by being the first human being to go to space and orbit the Earth.

Here is an interesting documentary that looks at his epic flight fifty years ago on the Vostok-1 rocket side-by-side with his last flight on a training jet.

A Three-Way Space Decade

In a few days the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic orbital flight around Earth will take place. Yuri's Night, as it has been called for a decade now will entail hundreds of parties and events around the world to commemorate that event and the first space shuttle flight twenty years later. Space enthusiasts will collectively remember and celebrate. In fact, this decade will be full of golden anniversaries. However, in some ways, it will also look like a remake of an old movie, the one about rockets and capsules. Most interestingly, perhaps, this decade will be about beginnings and new steps towards space accessibility and use through suborbital and possibly orbital flights.

Discovery Final Launch Poll Results

Discovery, STS-133.
Credit: NASA

Back in September, a little over a month before Space Shuttle Discovery was supposed to originally launch for the last time I published an informal, low-tech poll whose purpose was to get a feel for awareness and interest levels of people who are not space enthusiasts themselves but rather friends or family of ones.

Questions

I purposefully asked pretty rudimentary questions:

1. Which Space Shuttle is getting ready for launch?
2. When is the next launch?
3. How many Space Shuttle launches remain after this one?
4. What mission number is it going to be?