Noe had invited me to speak at the Citizen Science group he has put together. I talked about the North Houston Space Society. My mom and wife came. Gary was one of the participants. He had worked on the shuttle system. He was not familiar with NASA’s plans to put people back on the moon. He had heard something vague, and was thinking that maybe the private sector was overtaking NASA.

He thinks the fact that it was 1972 since we last went was awful. And would like to see more money go into exploration. Why are we spending 1/3 of our national budget on the military and less than 1% on NASA. In fact, he saw a statistic that we spend more money on video games each year than NASA.

What do we need to do to get people excited about it? For him, nothing. He is excited by nature. And he has heard people say that we should “work on controlling diseases instead of going to space”. At this citizen science meeting Covid was not on anybody’s mind. And I wonder what Gary thinks about that now.