A moment of gratitude…. for my favorite clothes, bearing a […]

A moment of gratitude…. for my favorite clothes, bearing a certain common theme:
1) A black hoodie “Flown on Board NASA SpaceX Crew Demo-2” (SpaceX’s first flight of astronauts to orbit)
2) Space Lasers! A big latency improvement will be coming from these inter-satellite links (ISL) now launching for the Starlink broadband network. My favorite physics fact regarding this: the speed of light is 1.5x faster in space than in ordinary glass fiber (refractive index n=1.5). It also affords a straighter point-to-point connection in many places, like Africa. Those advantages are hard to beat on the ground (without replacing current infrastructure).
3) Orbital cats with lasers… even better. It’s the back of the shirt designed by and for the engineers. Cats have only flown suborbitally (with the French space program). As we all know, suborbital flight is just a tease. Cats want to be real astronauts one day, like the dogs. Heck, even turtles have been around the moon and back (with the Russians).
4) A jacket-borne reminder that SpaceX is not even 20 years old. Blue is older.
5) From the archives… skiing with my son when NASA announced that SpaceX and Boeing were chosen for the Commercial Crew program, back in 2013. My son and I still ski with those jackets.

And tonight, as luck would have it, SpaceX might light a big candle for my birthday! 🙂 Last year, my birthday candle was the Crew Dragon Demo 1 launch.