_{I remember when I was just a kid, how I would climb up on the painter's ladder that we kept in the garage so I could get onto the roof of our house, and I’d lay there for hours until my mother would come out and put a stop to it, insisting that I’d fall asleep and tumble down to my death, or at the very least some very expensive hospital bills. But how could I ever have fallen asleep when there were so many stars to count, so many constellations to memorize? I wanted to be an astronaut so that I could be just a few more hundred miles closer to the stars, a few miles less atmosphere clouding my view of heaven. They lied to us when we were kids, anyway, fooled us into believing in a space program that was capable of colonizing the moon, or mars, or even the moons of Jupiter. Space stations were supposed to be as common as jumbo jets, orbital travel an easy achievement for even the most common of men and women. We grew up to discover a shameful excuse for a space administration, plagued with funding deficits and disaster, no truly functional space stations, no artificial gravity, no colonies anywhere but on earth. Still, we had the skies to dream of, and places like rural Mississippi at two in the morning to remind us.}