The Air Up There

Sometimes it's nice to see the alma mater back in the news for something other than being nudged out of the top ten in competition for Party School of the Year. I know. I was there: A mile high and rising wasn't just a way to intimidate other schools' athletic teams. It was a good way to describe a large portion of the student body at the University of Colorado. It is also a way to connect to our astronaut alumni.
We had one of the first: Scott Carpenter. He was in "The Right Stuff" and everything, even if he wasn't played by a Quaid. And we had some guys go up in the Apollo missions, including lucky number thirteen. Jack Swigert gives us one degree of separation from Kevin Bacon. We have also lost a couple to the "surly bonds of earth." Ellison Onizuka died in the Challenger launch. Kalpana Chawla was a member of the ill-fated Columbia crew. I guess I'm suggesting that, in the big book of space exploration, CU has certainly made their contribution by any measure. Boulder, Colorado even gave us Astronauts who could rock, like out of this world, man.
Now, the college from which I graduated is preparing a mission to Mars to investigate what life may have existed there, once upon a time. NASA has budgeted four hundred and thirty-eight million dollars for the expedition. No one from Colorado or any other academic institution will ride along with the suite of instruments that will probe the Red Planet's atmosphere and its interactions with the sun. No one, that is , unless somebody gets really wasted and passes out in the capsule the night before the launch. Stay tuned.