Back before Apollo 15 I met someone who had a friend at the space center in Houston. I wrote him, Ron was his name, and asked for various odds and ends regarding Apollo. What I would get in the mail would lead to a lifetime of collecting, and sacrifice of anything that appeared to be the quaint notion of “savings.” Apollo 15’s “flight plan” Ron had sent me a copy of Apollo 15’s “flight plan” and a copy of the Apollo Operations Handbook. I had...

In the arena of space collecting there are many levels to handle the many different interests and bank accounts. The most cost effective are things such as patches from the various missions, photo or other swag commonly found in NASA gift shops or on the web. The more serious collectors opt for autographs from Apollo era astronauts, or even flown artifacts. Several online dealers advertise flown items such as small pieces of parachute material...

On this, the 46th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, take note of the following space oddity: For all of the beautiful photos from man’s first walk on the moon, interestingly enough there exists but a single still photo of Neil Armstrong on his historic walk. One of his duties was to take photos while Buzz Aldrin set out the experiments. Armstrong of course, is visible in the relatively poor television from the lunar surface, in...

It’s no secret that I have a NASA obsession. That would be obvious the moment you step into World HQ for Global Domination, otherwise known as “my house.” The first WTF is a spacesuit seated in one of my otherwise nice Ethan-Allen chairs. Then there’s the large Soviet-made N1 model, and over in my TV room is...

I love my “job.” As one who deals in astronomy education it is my sworn duty to go to any odd corner of the world in search like-minded types. And so I undertook a torturous journey to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, owned by Spain but not too far to the east from Morocco. It was on these islands, that the first Starmus conference was held in 2011. The Canaries were chosen as the organizers live there and due to the large number of...

Since we’re in the High Holy week for space nerds everywhere as this being the 45th anniversary of Apollo 11, my Weird Crap is a pair of handrails from a lunar module. They don’t look like much, but they’re FREAKING HAND RAILS FROM THE FREAK’N LUNAR MODULE! I wasn’t sure on how to display them but then did this as the “porch” to the inner sanctum, the second floor in other words.