Space

Grandparents, History, and Passions by Rebecca Tillett

Have I ever told you that my grandmother was a bird and wildlife rehabilitator? That she eventually became known as the "bird lady" in Las Cruces? Have I ever told you that my grandfather joined NASA at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston in 1962, then in 1963 transferred to the White Sands Test Facility near Las Cruces, known then as the "Apollo Site?" That he served first as Chief of the Test Operations Branch, then as Chief of the Propulsion Test Office, where he oversaw the development and qualification testing of the rocket propulsion systems used on the Apollo Service Module and Lunar Module, leading to mankind's first steps on the Moon in 1969?

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Moon (this is where I am these days) by Rebecca Tillett

"The Moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the Moon that pulls the tides, and the Moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the Moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. . . . When we describe the Moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness." —D.H. Lawrence

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