My First Visit to Space

My first experience with a shuttle – an open house at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Lompoc, California in November 1984. Fittingly it was also the very first Space Shuttle built.

(Click for full size view) The tall orange jacketed man is my dad and I’m holding my dad’s hand in the blue jacket. All of 4 years old. My mom and younger brother, Joe, only 4 months old, were behind the camera. I have no idea who the guy looking at the camera is.

I’m holding my dads hand in this photo that my mom dug up, looking upward at the Space Shuttle Enterprise. Besides being on tour around this time, it was used to test the shuttle launch pad at VAFB. It’s now in New York and and officially designated as a historic “place” in the National Register of Historic Places.

Sadly, I have no memory of this first-person view, but I was a devoted fan of space exploration and science from my earliest memories not long after that. And even my earliest memories of computers, and inter-connecting them, involved NASA (I remember, specifically, how I thought I could access NASA computers, even before I owned or even knew what a modem was. Not sure why I wanted into their computers, but it made sense at the time.)