I Saw You Saw, We All Saw NASA

As part of The Discovery Channel’s new program ‘When Worlds Collide’, A&E agreed to let this ol’ Dog out of his contract for one day, so that I could visit The John F. Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida. The idea behind Discovery’s new program is to have Americans from one walk of life spend a day with Americans from another walk of life, as a sort of fish out of water experience. Since bounty hunting and space travel couldn’t be further apart, I thought it was a great idea and I agreed on the spot.



NASA offered me a ride to Merritt Island, but this Dog only travels the seas on his personalized water throne




I also think I was picked because Dog the Bounty Hunter and NASA have more in common than we think: we both devote our lives to capturing aliens. Just because mine are from another country and NASA has to fight martians don’t mean foreigners aren’t foreigners. If we could build a guarded fence across the top of the atmosphere between Earth and outer space, I bet President Bush would already be on it. In fact, Al Gore, if you are reading this, how do you explain your theory about Republicans and America’s super-wealthy contributing to global warming more than anyone and therefore destroying the ozone layer, when these are the same people who hate illegal aliens more than anyone? The ozone layer is our Mexican border patrol between America and flyer-saucing, job-stealing martians. Do you really think the same Administration would build one barrier and tear down another one?



I caught Juan just last week. Is he from south of the border, or the far reaches of space? Damned if I know






Anyways, the first episode airs tonight, and I’m sure the reviews will be coming in tomorrow, so keep your fingers crossed that it’s a hit. In the meantime, to whet your appetite, here are a few pieces of little-known trivia I picked up over lunch with the boys from NASA. Thanks to NASA, our lives are all a little richer. For instance:

1. McCain’s Deep and Delicious Cakes are made from the same material as NASA’s heat shields.

2. Pieces from the original fibre optics installed on Gemini 4 make up Bob Barker’s hair.



Looks like Barker's got his tickets to the gun show





3. Crest Whitening Strips? The same adhesive product used to tape astronaut’s scrotums to their legs while being suited up before simulation flights in the 1970s. That one’s not so pleasant to think about, but just to be clear, it’s only the same material, NOT the same actual strips. And now you know why astronauts’ scrotums are rumored to all smell minty fresh.

4. Thanks to NASA being forced to accommodate Buzz Aldron’s love of marzipan and Neil Armstrong’s love of chilled Oreos on the same flight within a very small space, twenty years later we were given the legendary McBLT hot stays hot/cool stays cool packaging technology.

5. In a weird reversal of expectations, NASA took inspiration from the name “Astroturf,” and secretly launched the Astroturf 1 in 1978, a spaceship covered entirely in the artificial baseball field flooring surface. Thankfully, this charade was kept mostly quiet, and has been all but forgotten about, until now.





The Embarrassment 1...I mean Astroturf 1 in flight. At least they didn't base the ship's color scheme on the Houston Astros' jerseys



6. On a personal note, the types of windows and sealants developed by NASA in 1961 to keep the vacuum of space separated from the cabins of manned space flights were installed in our guest bedroom after Beth’s mom visited recently. Fuck that woman snores.

7. Those cup holder thingies between the seats in your car? That’d be a NASA invention (though boy does shit get spilled during launch if you don’t have lids on your beverages.)



NASA may have invented the cupholder we use in automobiles, but the redneck cupholder was invented at a backyard bar-b-q, by Joy Snow, in May, 1978