JimMcDade
06-21-2008, 12:31 PM
I am Jim McDade, the moderator of the InsideKSC Space Exploration Roundtable. I am married to Ann and we have two high school kids who are a lot smarter than I am.
We also have a cat named Eclipse. She got her name because she is a former stray who walked into our lives while my son and I were lying on the driveway watching a total lunar eclipse. She was wild, so I still bear quite a few scars on my hands from her months of adjustment to becoming a smug house cat.
I have been writing articles about space exploration for years. Some of my writing is for newspapers but most of my recent articles are written for web sites. I also appears as a guest on radio and television shows where I blab enthusiastically about space and technology.
My passion for space exploration began with my passion for studying and observing the sky. I was a planetarium instrument operator before I earned my college degree and I am more proud of my visual astronomy certificate from Troy State University than I am of my undergrad and grad studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I also was an astronomy editor for Space.Com's Amateur Astronomers Network.
I have attended more space launches at Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral than I can count and I have been fortunate enough to met almost all of the men who flew to the moon in Apollo spacecraft. I hope that, during their lifetimes, the current generation of young people will have the good fortune to witness something as inspiring and significant as those Apollo missions of 1968-72. Apollo really was a giant leap in human history. We need to get busy real soon and make some even longer leaps.
We also have a cat named Eclipse. She got her name because she is a former stray who walked into our lives while my son and I were lying on the driveway watching a total lunar eclipse. She was wild, so I still bear quite a few scars on my hands from her months of adjustment to becoming a smug house cat.
I have been writing articles about space exploration for years. Some of my writing is for newspapers but most of my recent articles are written for web sites. I also appears as a guest on radio and television shows where I blab enthusiastically about space and technology.
My passion for space exploration began with my passion for studying and observing the sky. I was a planetarium instrument operator before I earned my college degree and I am more proud of my visual astronomy certificate from Troy State University than I am of my undergrad and grad studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I also was an astronomy editor for Space.Com's Amateur Astronomers Network.
I have attended more space launches at Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral than I can count and I have been fortunate enough to met almost all of the men who flew to the moon in Apollo spacecraft. I hope that, during their lifetimes, the current generation of young people will have the good fortune to witness something as inspiring and significant as those Apollo missions of 1968-72. Apollo really was a giant leap in human history. We need to get busy real soon and make some even longer leaps.