Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Back from Spacefest

Holy moley, I don't know where to start. I was at Spacefest 2009 in San Diego this past weekend. I will endeavor to provide some photos and commentary over the course of the coming week(s). Suffice it to say at the moment that at this conference, I met half of the men who have walked on the Moon - Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Ed Mitchell, Dave Scott, Charlie Duke, and Gene Cernan - in addition to about a dozen other Apollo-era and Space Shuttle astronauts. I spent waaaaaaaaaay more money than I intended to on autographs, but I now have some very cool Apollo-era artifacts that are signed by participants in every lunar landing.

This photo is Jane and me with the crew of Apollo 9, together again for the first time since 1972, in front of their Command Module, "Gumdrop." This was at a reception at the San Diego Aerospace Museum.

More later, I promise... for now, I'm getting ready to go off to Cairo on Thursday...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My wife and I went...and it was too cool. First we golfed in the Moonwalker tournament on Thursday (Gene Cernan was our partner). Golf was great, I got "closest to the pin" award where I beat out Jim McDivitt (and got a cool moonwalker trophy). Unfortunatly Charlie Duke's group beat us by 2 strokes to win it. On Saturday we also went to the VIP reception at the SD museum where they were honoring the Apollo 9 crew. All the astronauts where there and were very friendly (we got pictures with all the moonwalkers including Buzz). It helped it was open bar, so all were feeling pretty good. Having lived in Nassau Bay during the moonshots years I knew some of the astronauts (Vance Brand was a nieghbor who I had not seen in over 35 years). Finally, I have to say, Gene was a fun guy to hang out with over the whole three days we were there (of course he spent more time with my wife than me).