Congrats, Dr. Hollish!

Kinderbloggen is not a place that is going to break any news outside the sphere of poop and Sesame Street, but there is breaking news out of Paris that is tangentially related, so I am going to post it here:

Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Andreas Mogensen, Ph.D (2007, Aerospace Engineering, University of Texas at Austin) is (and this is not a joke) one of the European Space Administration's newest astronauts, despite being actually a Californian without U.S. citizenship who happens to hold a Danish passport.



To say "Congrats, Hollish!" is a wild understatement, because this is simply inconceivable. I thought knowing a guy who plays in the NFL was awesome, but that's over 200 people a year. Before today there were eight ESA astronauts. Eight.

A year ago, Ariane and I were in Konstanz, Germany, visiting Andy and his girlfriend just a day before Andy was flying to Hamburg to perform the first round of testing. The first step was some ridiculous memory test, and Andy was convinced he was going to bomb out in the first elimination because he was doing terribly on some practice tests. Yet, after a year, ESA pared down the 8,400+ applications and picked just six or so (I got news Monday - I promptly freaked out in my office and had the people next door worried that I had hurt myself - and am writing this Tuesday night, so I don't know the exact number because they wouldn't even tell Hollish himself), and wouldn't you know it, but Andy is going to space, supposedly to work on the International Space Station. Only about 500 people have ever been in space. That is some elite company, my friends.

Sorry though, Andy, I am still not sorry for laughing at you every time you said you wanted to be an astronaut and go to Mars. It was preposterously silly then, and it still is now... it's just that you might actually get a chance to (I can't believe I'm about to type this) go to Mars.

So now Andy isn't going to have time for the little people from his past nor Earthlings in general (being locked down by gravity is so April 11, 1961). I will prefer to remember him from the awesome times, like when he won (read: lost) a ~15 person, ~$300 credit card roulette game in Phoenix.


Sucka.

I can now tell my daughter that, yes, she can be anything she wants to be. And I can actually mean it.

Good luck, Hollish.