seeing people i know on the teevee

i just think it's neat to flip on the teevee and see somebody i know. like right now, i just tuned in "from the earth to the moon" on tnt, and there's footage of rusty schweickart, hanging out on the "front porch" of the lunar excursion module of apollo 9. i met rusty this april at the conference on world affairs at cu-boulder. he's a great guy - these days, he and fellow astronaut and cwa participant ed lu are doing something called the b612 foundation, which has the goal of developing technology to deflect an earthbound asteroid by 2012.

(aside - tnt is showing all 12 episodes of "from the earth to the moon" all day tomorrow. even though we have all the episodes on vhs at work for anyone to take home and watch, i may end up in front of the teevee all day [again]. although i did try to tivo the whole thing; the 40gig hard drive currently in the tivo isn't big enough to hold all 12 episodes at high quality. guess i still need to just buy the damn series on dvd. end of aside.)

i caught the new nova miniseries, "origins," the other day, and that was full of folks i know. cwa participant bill hartmann talked about how he came up with the currently accepted theory that the moon was formed when a mars-sized planetismal (they always call it a planetismal, but "mars-sized" kinda implies that it was a planet, eh?) smashed into the young earth. and he also talked about all the comets that bombarded the earth long ago. cwa participants seth shostak and jill tarter were briefly on the show, talking about various things that seti is up to these days. although they weren't on too much; most of the seti talk was from frank drake, understandably. although i was surprised that they didn't have more of seth's witticisms. he's pretty damn funny. "origins" also had steve mojzsis from cu-boulder talking about his discovery that earth had water as long ago as 4.3 billion years ago. and mars society folks penny boston and chris mckay. it was a pretty good show, too.

update -- now they're showing neal armstrong & buzz aldrin stepping onto the moon in "from the earth to the moon." i had lunch with buzz at a conference in colorado springs a while back. he sat down at the table where i was having lunch, and i got into a debate with him about whether we should return to the moon (his position) or just send people straight to mars (mine). it was fun to hold the position that there's no point in returning to the moon while debating with someone who's actually been there.