[Oe List ...] NASA software developer moves on ...

Sat Sep 29 20:55:08 PDT 2012

To colleagues related to NASA and its work, here's a "testimonial" that was in the Opinion column of the Saipan Tribune a week Tuesday. 

The usual caveat to the rest of the listserv: curious, welcome; not, see you at the next bend.

The earthrise Armstrong

>From the USS Philippine Sea, Astronaut Neil Armstrong of the US Navy, the first man to walk on the moon, had his cremated remains scattered to the four winds in the Atlantic Ocean a few days ago.  It was not the personality of Armstrong, that made his final "over and out" call late July, that made us skip a heartbeat.  It was the effect of the mission he undertook that got us on a particular journey.  Thus, this testimonial.

I was still in my teens, pretending to be an old man, broadcasting a morning political and social commentary cum music over one of two the local commercial radios in a Cagayan town.  The program was, "The love and life of old man Jaime" (ti ayat ken biag ni 'tang Jaime). Sometimes we subbed for the noon newscast and it was then that we learned of the assassination of the young JFK.

We mention this because it was the young president that boldly declared his intent to send a man on the moon by the end of the decade.  Armstrong made it on schedule.

I was in Tar Heel country, in the Piedmont of North Carolina, when on a freezing Christmas in a house heated by burning coal in the basement, we watched photos from Apollo 8 three years before Armstrong's historic walk on Apollo 11.  The blue orb in the sky rose to the shutter click of a camera hovering over the moon, taking an image usually seen on earth of the moon or the sun emerging up to the earth's horizon.  In a twist on metaphor, a term and an iconic picture were born, the "earthrise", unarguably the most potent mythical symbol of the 20th century.

There it was, this little planet with only the land and water boundaries visible to the eye, unmindful of the imaginary political delineations that humans have constructed through the centuries to separate parcels of territories into nations.  There were just the continents and the water, exposing the reality that the separation of nations, areas, and regions are human constructs that can be deconstructed.  Nations have taken lives of their own, imposed on territories for the sake of powerful vested interests.

Suddenly, our Eureka occurred as we realized that the fragile ecosystem we were watching was not a made for TV illusion, but actually a "living" organism with humans acting as its brain.  In 1968, that brain was already showing cancerous characteristics.  I was in the United States in the middle of the civil rights crisis, a war on poverty, and waging a war in Vietnam that caused an otherwise competent president not to seek reelection.

The Limits of Growth report from the Club of Rome was still four years away to notoriety, but the viciousness we were showing in dealing with the racial divide, and the devastation we were visiting on an impoverished country proud enough to say "Non" to their Gaelic colonizers and determined not to be under the imposition of a foreign rule again, was just unconscionable.

It was then, in a feat of youthful idealism, and prophetic realism, that we chose the "earthrise" to be our home.  A radical transformation occurred that took us from a peasant boy of the northern Luzon hinterlands, to becoming a glocal citizen, though we were still a decade away before we started using the portmanteau, a morpheme of "thinking globally, acting locally". 

The picture of the earthrise has since graced our living space, externally and internally.  As part of my introduction, and the students are likewise asked to introduce themselves using the guide questions of what, when, where, who, how, and why, I begin by claiming the earth as my hometown, and there is no place in it where I am a stranger.  In my glocal being, I have appropriated a native-ness to every piece and parcel of it, animate and inanimate.  The mantra in our young adulthood still prevails:  All the goods of the Earth belong to all the people.  All the decisions of history belong to all the people.  All the inventions of humanness belong to all the people.

We might have ceased actively in the sloganeering part as the focus has been at the point where the rubber hits the road.  Being a glocal citizen in a deeply rooted ethnocentric culture like China (along with most of the world) is a challenge and a half.  In the process, our peripatetic pedagogy has taken us to the Hausa and Yoruba of Nigeria, the Hindu Om of Maharashtra, the Aleut of Alaska, the brothers and sisters in Rome, the Nippon and their Shinkanzen in the Land of the Rising Sun, the Metis of prairie Canada, the durian and rambutan of Malaysia and Indonesia, the Kimchee of Korea, the proa of Micronesia and Polynesia, and all but one State in the Union.  Now, we sup on the mein chow and gao zi of Dong Bei among people who call themselves the creatures of the middle, Zhongguoren.

It has been a passage of spectacular proportions and deep currents in the incursion, emptying the pocket book in the excursion but enriching to no end the dB of the experience.  Still, the expedition ain't over yet, and thanks to Neil Armstrong ("one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind") and the Apollo mission crew, this country boy of the Malay race is managing to join the great leap forward of humankind.

j'aime la vie

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Wegner <twegner at swbell.net>
To: Order Ecumenical Community <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Sun, Sep 30, 2012 10:39 am
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] NASA software developer moves on ...

Ruth wrote:

> I'm glad to know that a colleague was involved 
> with the space shuttle program!

There were at least three at NASA - 

Larry Henscen (space station design)
Lynn Oden (shuttle navigation flight controller)
Tim Wegner (shuttle navigation software developer)

Tim
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