Fifty years ago this month of November, the Saturn V moon rocket, took to its wings for the very first time. T-minus-Zero of this unmanned flight came at precisely 7 AM Florida time. Walter Cronkite would yell “Our building’s shaking here. Our building’s shaking!” as pieces of his set started to fall apart. But who can blame him, as the most powerful rocket that has ever flown took off a scant 3 1/2 miles away. The USSR’s N-1 moon rocket had...

We were taken out to only a few hundred feet from the vehicle for about 45 minutes of oooo-ing and awww-ing. During Apollo days, we’d be about 1500 feet from the Saturn, which looked about as big though. (Unfortunately, the Saturns were enveloped by a secondary service structure meant to get engineers up to any possible part of the rocket. That would only be rolled away a day or so before launch, so the tours could never see it up...

I’m going to see the launch of the SpaceX Dragon! History is complete with men and women of an “easy comfort” (i.e., loaded) who became patrons to the arts and sciences. In some cases themselves becoming skilled practitioners in their own right. Galileo owed his livelihood to funding from the Medici family; Tycho, the Danish court; Copernicus, the wealthy Watzenrode family of the Polish town, Torun’. Lick Observatory above San Jose, California,...