Homer Hickam - Life and Times

  This is the story of my experience as an advisor to the National Space Council under Vice President Mike Pence and Vice President Kamala Harris and how the latter gave me the sack except she probably didn't but somebody else did in her name because, as far as I can tell, the VP knows virtually nothing about space exploration nor seems to want to learn.  Anyway, first up: My experience with National Space Council Chairman - VP Mike Pence who loved space and wanted to do what he could to help reach our space goals - including defining them. One day in 2017, a representative of Vice President Mike Pence asked me to be on the National Space Council as an advisor on something called the Users Advisory Group (UAG). That sounded interesting. "What are my duties?" I asked. "Give advice about space and stuff," came the answer. Prodigious.  The first NSC meeting that I attended was in 2018 at Kennedy Space Center. When I met Mike Pence, I gave him an autographed...

This is the story of my experience as an advisor to the National Space Council under Vice President Mike Pence and Vice President Kamala Harris. One day in 2017, I got an email from a fellow at NASA Headquarters. Astonishingly, the note said this Coalwood, West Virginia boy was being asked to be a National Space Council advisor! Since I had never encountered the National Space Council in all the years I worked for NASA, I quickly looked it up. It turned out the National Space Council included all the federal organizations that had a foot in the space business. That meant not only the NASA Administrator but the Secretaries of Defense, Labor, Transportation, Education, Commerce, Treasury, Management and Budget, plus a bunch of staff members at the White House.   Reading on, I saw the National Space Council was abolished in 1993 during the Clinton/Gore Administration. That kind of rang a bell and now that I gave it some thought, I did recall a little about it. One of the roles Vice Pr...

              So now we live in a world where Jimmy Buffett has passed. I never expected to live in that world since I figured my clock would surely run out before his but here we are, JimmyB gone and, like a lot of folks, I find myself thinking about him beyond the "Oh, there's a Jimmy Buffet song," kind of way.             Simply put, JimmyB was a great writer. He had a way with a lyric and a turn of a phrase that was beyond most of his peers. Even without a note of his music or the sound of his voice, we're instantly transported into his world when we think about the lines he wrote. He was about the only singer who could make a volcano or hurricane funny but even though his songs might have seemed frivolous at first listen, most of the time JimmyB took us deep. Although it's often celebrated as a happy drinking song, his signature Margaritaville ...