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talked about how he and Sonya had recently become obsessed with paleontology, how he’d used his geology background to get them volunteer work at the university’s museum. How they’d been invited on digs sponsored by the museum, and how fun it was to sift through the mud, chasing fossils, using science as a tool to re-create things they’d read about in books. Animated, he described how he’d found an actual Tyrannosaurus rex tooth on their most recent dig—only the fifth tooth found in that area of Utah.
    Of course, he didn’t mention the fact that while working as an inventory assistant at the museum, he’d also borrowed a few particularly cool fossils he’d been transporting to the storage closet—one rock jammed into his pocket becoming a few more fossils added a couple of days later—displaying them in his living room, often bringing them out at dinner parties to impress Sonya’s friends. But he didn’t think there was anything wrong with showing off such precious objects—the bigger crime, to him, was leaving those fossils in crates in a dark basement. Wasn’t displaying such historical objects the whole point of a museum in the first place?
    He had a feeling his fellow co-op would understand; she shared his adventurous bent. And listening to snippets of conversations going on all around him, he knew that the two of them were not alone. He was in a place full of young people with vivid spirits.
    When he finally reached the auditorium, shaking Bob Musgrove’s hand for the first time—getting a full pat on the back and a warm welcome—Thad was completely swept up in the emotion of the moment. He felt like he had found a home.
    The feeling only grew through the introductory lecture, led by Musgrove and continued by a handful of JSC speakers. These speakers included a real live astronaut, in full uniform, porcupined with glorious, colorful NASA patches that marked him as someone who had flown in the shuttle— actually been to space . The astronaut detailed the history of the JSC—really, just giving life to the pixels in the mural hanging on the wall back in the lobby:
    How it all started with a Russian dog named Laika: two months after Sputnik One stunned the world and put the fear of Soviet-controlled space in America’s mind, the Russians managed to put a mutt, Laika, into orbit. No matter that the poor dog died from heat and stress on the way up—Eisenhower, terrified that Russia was going to win the space race, began plans for an astronaut program. In April 1962, construction of the JSC began in the Clear Lake area of Houston—a place chosen because of its smooth topography, and the fact that Rice University was willing to give the government a cheap lease price for the land.
    The astronaut had the audience of co-ops enrapt from the very first word, although that could have been the result of his uniform and his natural cowboy swagger. He described how NASA moved from the Mercury program, which basically was about strapping men—equal parts brave and insane—to rockets aimed at low orbits, to the Gemini program, which was all about sustained life in space. Nine astronauts were chosen from a pool of almost eight thousand, given the name “The New Nine.” They flew ten missions, the third of which, while launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida, was backed up by the newly finished Mission Control Center in Houston. It wasn’t until Gemini Four that a full mission was controlled from the Houston center—made even more significant by the fact that it was also the first extravehicular space walk in human history.
    From there, the astronaut continued into the Apollo period, briefly reliving the moon landing, the greatest accomplishment of the last hundred years. Thad tuned out as the astronaut cycled through the eleven Apollos that flew from 1968 to 1972. Like everyone else in the room, he’d seen the movie. He was more interested, for the moment, in scanning the crowd around him, the faces so