It Was A Very Good Year

2009 was very good to me, but sometimes it takes awhile for the paperwork to catch up and prove it.

For example, I did most of my outreach work for Ares I-X in October, but it took until now to receive (as part of an overall group) a NASA Space Flight Awareness Team Award, which came with a framed certificate, pin, and medallion made from metal flown aboard Space Shuttle Discovery.

I'll take the attaboy regardless. The stuff is pretty frickin' cool, and it looks good on ye olde resume, yes? Oh yeah, you betcha!

Also picked up a couple of Group Achievement Awards for the Ares Projects: one for Ares Advocacy, and one for the Quarterly Progress Report. Got to save up those attaboys, for the resume, if nothing else. Or, more importantly, to save up for that day when I have an aws#!t. Father Dan tells me that five attaboys can equal one aws#!t ("Your mileage may vary"). Go figure. Still, here's to 2009: it was, indeed, a very good year.

Attaboy

You know, writers are really very simple creatures. For the most part, we just want to be left the hell alone unless you want to provide us with love, food, money, alcohol, or recognition for the work we've done. Last Friday, I got a little recognition from the recent AIAA SpaceOps Conference:


Mr. Bart D. Leahy
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center
MSFC, AL 35812

Dear SpaceOps Author(s):

On behalf of the SpaceOps Executive Committee, it is our distinguished pleasure to congratulate you on an outstanding manuscript as presented at the SpaceOps 2010 conference in Huntsville, Alabama. Your topic has been selected by the SpaceOps editorial board as one of the best in the conference and we are pleased to invite you to contribute to the post conference book to be published in the Progress in Astronautics and Aeronautics series by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) entitled “Space Operations: Exploration, Scientific Utilization & Technology Development.” This hard-bound book, scheduled for release in the summer of 2011, will be a compilation of the best papers from SpaceOps 2010, enhanced and updated to include updated results and additional information.
…
We congratulate you on your outstanding manuscript and hope that you will choose to have it included in the SpaceOps 2010 post conference book.

Sincerely,

The SpaceOps 2010 Book Editors

W00t and huzzah!