Cocoa Beach

Took the Beeline Expressway from Orlando to Cocoa Beach - a quick 45 minute drive, if you don't count the turnarounds - in time to meet with the Andrews/Joh family for dinner at Yen Yen. Photos of astronauts with the Chinese restaurateurs hung in the foyer. Buzz Aldrin, him I recognized, and John Glenn, who ran a political campaign on the strength of his vision of Earth, from space.

At dinner Jason Andrews, who is a sure-enough rocket scientist, talked a bit about real-estate on the moon, and what that might signify in the next generation's economy. He and Marian Joh, his wife and co-owner of their aerospace company, also talked about materials and fuel experiments at an office park in Bellevue. That I really want to see. But first we'll see the Space Shuttle Atlantis take off, in 1 day, 14 hours, and 32 minutes.

Last April Nicholas's school had its annual fund-raising auction. One of the items presented at the last minute, too late to be included in the catalogue, was a trip to see a Space Shuttle launch. Jason and Marian's company contracts to NASA, and for months they had been working on getting clearance to take another family with them to see the inner workings of a launch. Right before the auction they received word that it was a go, and so they offered a guided trip as an item for bidding. So generous. Seeing a Space-Shuttle was a long-held dream of Todd's, who had NASA pictures on his bedroom wall growing up, and went to the planetarium for his eighth birthday party. He'd told me a few months before the auction that the shuttle program was going to be shut down within a year. During the auction he got up to talk with someone, and when I saw him again, I'd won the bid. So we were going. Two delays and three sets of tickets later, here we are, counting down.