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Getting an actual astronaut to voice himself was just genius.
As for the letter... Well, I've always been a spaceflight nerd. I'm old enough to have stayed up late with the rest of the family to watch that historic moment when men set foot on the moon for the first time. but before that I remember Jim Lovell & co reading the bible from lunar orbit on Apollo 8.
I got into trouble at school for correcting the teacher on the actual words used by mission control at liftoff. Like I said, spaceflight nerd...!
I'm also old enough to have believed when I was younger that by the 21st century the moon would be a holiday destination, and that man would have set foot on mars by the eighties, nineties at the latest.
And yes, unmanned probes have shown us a hell of a lot. Voyager, launched in the seventies, is still out there, still doing good science, and about to be come the first man made object to enter interstellar space. That's bloody amazing, and i don't think the engineers who built that could have believed in their wildest dreams how well the craft would perform.
Mars rover Opportunity has vastly outlasted its expected mission life and has returned marvellous information about the surface of Mars.
Cassini has expanded our knowledge about the moons of Saturn, and so on.
But I still want to see someone standing on the surface of Mars, in my lifetime. I'd expected this to happen some time ago, and certainly if the USA had spent nearly as much money on NASA as they'd spent on making wars on other people, this could have happened decades ago.
But moving back on topic, yeah, I'm with Mutta. You get it or you don't, and trying to explain to people who don't get it is an uphill task.
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