Agent Palmer

I recently sat down and built the LEGO Ideas International Space Station (ISS). Like the Saturn V and Lunar Lander before it, the release of this set coincided with an anniversary.

Released in 2020, the set marks 20 years since the station helped start a continuous human presence in space. LEGO pays another wonderful tribute to the station that orbits Earth 16 times a day and is the work of five different space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada).

“NASA wasn’t created in a vacuum and suddenly tasked with the Moon landing,” writes Amy Shira Teitel in her debut publication Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA.

Without historians and authors, of which Teitel is both, it would appear as if NASA did just appear on the scene ready, able, and willing to start Projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. But the truth is much more intriguing and far less polished than pop culture and general history would have you believe.

What we know of as rock n roll, is not only the story of music but the history of instruments as well. The Birth of Loud chronicles a rivalry that was at the center of more than one musical movement and it is superbly written by Ian S. Port who not only describes the people and their instruments, the trials and innovation, but the feelings of change and moments of inspiration.

Author Ian S. Port writes this book not only with great prose, but there’s some poetry in there too. His description of Hendrix at Woodstock performing the Star-Spangled Banner is the best I have ever read…

Amy Shira Teitel’s Fighting for Space: Two Pilots and Their Historic Battle for Female Spaceflight features two characters who, while separated by 25 years in age, both lead the way for Sally Ride, but it wasn’t a smooth flight.

It’s compelling in the most dramatic of ways, and not just because the space program NASA had at the start consisted of “a bunch of rockets with a tendency to explode.” And despite a rallying cry of wanting the first woman in space to be American, it was Valentina Tereshkova from the Soviet Union who got there first.

It would seem illogical at best to expect that a physical game like Magic: The Gathering would be my entrance into the digital world and the many communities and chats of Twitch, but that is exactly how it happened. And in my case, I’m still close enough to the beginning to understand how it happened.

My podcast, The Palmer Files, is a prime example of my interest in beginnings at the moment, so I figured I would track how this all went down.