I was never a Girl Scout (nor was I a Boy Scout, for that matter), so I had no idea there were space-oriented merit badges to be earned! This charming account by Ken Murphy describes his experience riding herd over 50 girls, helping them earn their badges. Neat stuff, definitely give it a read!

I first saw these strange little matchbooks on Retro Thing. Digging around Google resulted in more pictures, but little information, apart from what the article above states. The set of twelve matchbooks comes in a case, numbered as a limited edition item. The back of the case card lists all the technology RCA provided for the Apollo program, as seen below.

The matchbooks display Apollo mission patches on one side, and mission portraits on the other; also a montage of presidential portraits, for those involved in the program.

An amusing interesting little post on Slashdot earlier this week:

“Michael Benson is proposing that NASA send the ISS to the moon instead of leaving it low earth orbit. (While we’re at it, we should re-brand it as the ‘International Space Ship.’) He points out that it’s already designed to be moved periodically to higher orbits so instead of just boosting it a few miles, strap on some ion engines and put it in orbit around the moon instead of the earth. That would provide an initial base for the astronauts going to the moon and give the ISS a purpose other than performing yet more studies on the effect of micro gravity on humans. Benson concludes: ‘Let’s begin the process of turning the ISS from an Earth-orbiting caterpillar into an interplanetary butterfly.’”

My favorite part? Among the tags listed on the article: “goodluckwiththat”.

Edit: If anyone’s interested, the orange moon icon used as this site’s favicon, as well as in the above graphic, is available here: