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all, “A preview of the greatest adventure awaiting mankind.”
    As soon as there was a NASA, I became its number-one fan. I watched every launch on TV. I wrote for photos and stuck them on the walls of my bedroom. I knew at sight every missile in the U.S. arsenal…Redstone, Vanguard, Jupiter, Thor, Atlas, Titan. I could recite their height, thrust, and payload weight. I learned NASA’s vocabulary: apogee, perigee, payload, LOX, A-okay. I sent NASA drawings of my own rockets and gave them helpful suggestions on how they might build better missiles. I followed the trials and tribulations of NASA’s program with the same passion other kids followed their favorite ball team. When the Mercury 7 astronauts were announced I memorized their biographies and pored over Life magazine’s photo-essays on them and their machines. I couldn’t wait to be one of them and constructed a fantasy in which I would actually replace them. One of the points continually raised in the news was the anemic thrust of NASA’s rockets. The United States launched grapefruit-size satellites while the Russian payloads were measured in tons. I was convinced, when all was said and done, Alan Shepard and John Glenn and the other astronauts would be too heavy to be blasted into orbit. In my dream NASA would be unable to find any adult test pilot light enough for one of their rockets to lift. They would then search among the skinny kids of America to staff the astronaut corps. I wrote to NASA with that very suggestion, making sure my name and address were prominent.
    The rockets and posters and sky watching weren’t enough. Astronauts were pilots. I had to fly. At age sixteen I began flying lessons. After a dozen hours my instructor deemed me safe enough to solo. There are some memories so seared into our synapses we carry them to our graves—our first sexual experience, the birth of our children, combat, the death of a loved one. I can include my first solo flight in those memories that will play in full Technicolor in my age-addled brain. Four decades later I can still feel the adrenaline-boosted flutter of my heart as I taxied onto the runway and glanced at that empty right seat. My left hand gripped the yoke so tightly I’m surprised I didn’t liquefy the plastic. My right hand was welded to the ball of the throttle. I lifted my feet from the brakes, slid the throttle to the firewall, and the machine slipped down the runway. I had never experienced a sound more sweet than the roar of that 100-horsepower engine. I eased the yoke back and watched the Earth fall away. Even in my later space shuttle launches I doubt my heart was pounding as it was at this moment in my life. I was flying! Later I walked to the car with the three most wonderful words in the English language written in my logbook: Cleared for solo .
    Unfortunately, there was one major impediment to continuing my flying lessons. Money. I had a little saved from summer jobs but flying lessons were expensive. It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention. For teenage boys, necessity is the mother of idiocy. At the time I had a teen friend who had also achieved solo status in his flying lessons and, like me, was struggling to find the funds to continue. We put our heads together and came up with a way to make our money go further. He would rent a plane from one of the Albuquerque airports and fly it to another city field. There, I would meet him and we would fly together, sharing expenses and flying time. There was just one small problem with our plan: It was felonious. As student pilots we could only fly solo or with our instructors. On every flight we would be violating FAA rules. But we quickly concluded that getting caught would be the only crime, and with him flying to a secondary airport to pick me up, we had reduced the chances of discovery.
    We decided to see how high we could climb and nursed the Cessna to 13,000 feet, violating yet another FAA requirement that