You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

When a perva varia was in the ninth grade, he was watching the television and the way

he describes it, he saw all these people in like orange spacesuits sitting on this vessel

and then he's seeing this countdown of 10, 9, 8 and then he saw stuff coming out of

the bottom of the rocket and then all of a sudden the rocket shoots up into the sky and

disappears and he was like, wait, where do they go?

That's Amanda Morris with The New York Times and she says a perva was amazed by what

he was seeing on TV except he kind of didn't know exactly what he was watching.

Because at the time, remember this is decades ago, there was no captions on his TV so he

could see what was going on but he didn't really know what was actually happening because

he couldn't hear the narrator.

What a perva saw was a crew of astronauts heading into space.

And he was like, I want to go to space and I want to be an astronaut.

So he immediately wrote a letter to NASA and he learned everything he could about space.

But then he got a letter back.

It was a big envelope.

There was a letter inside that said, thank you for writing and unfortunately we can't

accept that astronauts right now but maybe we can in the future.

Despite this letter, he wasn't deterred from making space a big part of his life.

So he went on and earned advanced engineering degrees and then went on to work for NASA.

He has directed space missions and helped design propulsion systems for satellites.

So he's a pretty big deal at NASA and he was a mission director for three different spacecraft.

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