The weather outside is frightful... at least by Gulf Coast standards. We're hanging out in the 30s at night with a cold, icy rain. Tonight we're expecting low 20s with wind chills in the teens, maybe less. I know, for all of you up north, you're saying, "suck it up, pal!" I feel the same. After 40 years here on the coast, I still haven't lost that Yankee blood and I'm enjoying the brief respite from heat and humidity.
This weather also makes a great excuse to keep brewing cups of hot tea and chocolate flowing (no, I didn't do hot Dr. Pepper - and for those of you wondering, it was a thing) and fleshed out more notes for two chapters of my new book, "Space Oddities: Forgotten Tales from Mankind's Exploration of Space".
Two chapters in particular are getting bigger and bigger. One is on the space program and Civil Rights with stories of Ed Dwight who should have been in the "New Twelve" astronaut corps in the early 60s after completing all of the tests and examinations with near perfection only to have his opportunity ripped out from under him, and the first black astronaut (well, cosmonaut) keeps getting more intricate.
The same goes for another chapter on international space agencies and flights. It just keeps getting more fascinating the more I research - the story of the Zambian space program whose centrifuge was an empty 55-gallon oil drum with a trainee in it that was rolled down a hill, the Soviet Union's plan to nuke the moon.
Suffice it to say, I now have binders of notes and reams of bookmarks in Internet Explorer on these two chapters alone. I guess I should start putting them all together. Deadlines wait for no man!
