I finnaly got to meet Paul's lovely Aunt Hilary! We had lunch on the fisherman's warf viewing the bay and also about a hundred Sea Lions!
We also helped run a NASA Academy Alumni Conference at NASA Ames. We got a great tour of the motion based trainer which is used for both R&D and also astronaut training for the shuttle. We also saw a 120 x 80 foot wind tunnel which was very cool. They test everything from semi-trucks to helicopters.
The weekend also included talks from senior Ames management, leading Mars scientists and a handful of SETI discussions through the SETI Day of Science. The most well known speaker was Jill Tarter, who the main charachter of the movie Contact was based off of. And our favorite was catching up with one of Paul's advisors in Physics who gave us a tour of his lab at the SETI institute.
My general impressions after the weekend: I want to make I Heart NASA T-shirts and although I do agree with the saying "If there isn't other life in the universe, what an awful waste of space," I don't believe we will see any of it in our lifetime... If your intrested in that thought, lets discuss it over dinner!
The last highlight was a great purchase from the Computer History Museum in San Jose, a T-Shirt with the quote "I think there is a market for maybe five computers" from the CEO of IBM in 1943. Perhaps the next great market, which I must give credit to Peter Diamandis for, will be sub-orbital flights to space?
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