Bob Kanefsky interview cont'd

NASA

I've spent 12 years being officially prohibited from saying that I work for NASA, something few people can say. I expect to spend many more years that way. (NASA Ames Research Center, to be precise. Officially, I've worked for a series of employers that all happen to have had a contract with the computer research division at Ames. I'm not in the civil service.)

I was born after the first satellites were launched into orbit and before the first humans were launched into orbit, and have been a space enthusiast for longer than I can remember. In the early 1970's, my favorite songs on the radio were the first two space songs I'd ever heard: "Rocket Man" and "Space Odditity". They both seem to have an anti-space bias in hindsight, but I took what I could get. In the optimistic time of the moon landings, it seemed reasonable to believe that by the time I was 30 there would be a space station large enough for 10,000 people to work in (like in the movie 2001), and if I worked hard I could be one of them.

"Minus Ten and Counting" was released at about the time I first started going to SF conventions and the filksings there. Looking back at it later, I realized that the tape was a big part of the reason I went to work for NASA (oops, I mean "at" NASA). Many of its songs had the message that it may be too late for the current generation to get into space, but that a consolation is to help others get there (astronauts, robots, future colonists). I know I didn't think that way when I was choosing a college, or at least was unaware of the geography of NASA, or I would have gone to Caltech and tried to get a job at JPL.

Of course, being immersed in the reality of space for 12 years has taken some of the excitement away. In my first year, the site of the label "Mars Program Requirements" on a filing cabinet could send chills up my spine, and I would stare longingly into the basement room down the hall from my office where racks of tape reels from Pioneer Venus Orbiter were stored. Now I can doze off listening to a lecture on attitude control subsystem state machines. Also, I've gotten so much in the habit of getting details of past missions right that I'm bothered by inaccuracies that I never noticed before. Even in classic filk songs: listen to "Toast for Unknown Heroes" and notice what it implies about how many astronauts were on the lunar surface and how many remained in orbit.