A Perfect Catch
In 2017, I found the file of my father’s short stories after driving from the Bay Area to San Diego in a box that I brought with me in my car. He had given them to me in 1995, but between his second divorce and third marriage, the file was forgotten. It was stroke of luck that I happened to bring that box with me. Most of the rest of my things stayed in storage in San Jose for two years until I finally moved them down to my tiny beachfront rental in Oceanside. I lived sparsely during those years, and even when I moved to Carmel Valley, many of my boxes remained unpacked and were eventually thrown away on moving day in an effort to cut down on cross country moving expenses. Along with my high school and college yearbooks and a flown flag from NASA, I lost a number of books that I have since replaced.
I spent the pandemic in Carmel Valley, walking distance to Del Mar, one of the most spectacular beaches in San Diego. It was during the lockdown that I finally found the time to transcribe my father’s stories, mostly typewritten, with comments handwritten in red and green pencil by Joseph Heller. It was a well-timed experience, as I was feeling lost and adrift in an environment that didn’t make much sense for me. It was a grounding experience, and wonderful to hear his voice again after so many years.
By then, I had launched Reloquence, an investible C Corp, from the Founder Institute, San Diego, but had pivoted so many times that it was just a legal structure with no clear business model. It was some time after that, after retiring from NASA, that I defined the planetary address framework, and eventually pivoted to a space-themed startup. This was much more comfortable for me given my background, and I began to explore planetary cartography and the First Roads in Space.
My father’s short stories had been a huge inspiration and a reminder of self, and so I named several of the planetary roads for roads in his stories: Rainy Ridge Road, Point View Road and Park Drive. I named a road for Joseph Heller’s editor, Robert Gottlieb, and a road for their collaboration, Heller Eskey Highway. In all, I named 32 planetary roads, one for each of the 32 Apollo astronauts. Although I did not define nomenclature guidelines, I used the International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) process as a model, choosing space-themed names from books, movies, art, and music. I chose geographical features on the Moon and Mars, and named nearby roads for them. I chose infamous historical figures such as Neil Armstrong and Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr. Although the IAU requires that the person be dead for three years before naming an astronomical object, I named several roads for people still living, including Elon Musk and his son, X Æ A-Xii.
In 2023, I moved to South Carolina to be closer to my mother, youngest sister and nephew, and started writing about the planetary address framework in the Astrogator, the Grand Strand Astronomers’ monthly newsletter. I passed an article from the June 2023 newsletter onto a former colleague from my early days in AI, and he passed it onto a friend who had a mapping company in Oregon. Paul Tice was the CEO of ToPA 3D/FiOR Innovations, and within minutes offered to make the first map pro bono. It took about six months, and after it was completed, I presented our work at the International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in Los Angeles in 2024, handing out many signed first prints of our lunar map to the attendees.
My father had charisma, and a certain unique way of looking at life, so that everything, even the most ordinary moments, became extraordinary.
He was writing about what he knew - small town Brentwood and the life and times of his group of literary classmates at Penn State - but he made it seem interesting and maybe even a little bit glamorous.
Most people don't have that quality, and after he died in 2002, I wasn't able to find it in anyone else. Life started to lose its luster. He was an academic, so it's not about money. In fact, the pursuit of money is not a particularly interesting topic. It's something else, some way of seeing and experiencing life that most people don't have, and then being able to express it in a work of fiction.
I don't have that talent, so what I have done instead is to go back through my life to identify the extraordinary moments, the people who made my life better, and the times when I felt most alive, and then to capture that in a process that isn't ephemeral. The planetary address framework and subsequent maps are a never ending story. They are timeless. They are universal symbols of eternity.
My sister, Jenny, has that talent. She wrote a screenplay called “Dragonfly,” that is just as good as my father’s short stories. I wrote a screenplay treatment about Apollo 15 that sticks to the facts except for a fictional subplot about the planetary roads. It’s not a work of art, but it is The First Road Trip in Space.
Today, I am happily settled in Murrells Inlet, and hoping to attract some kindred spirits so that we can continue mapping The First Roads in Space.
