As a side note, I’ve been watch a lot of stuff about NASA as of late. The Discovery Channel had two great specials (all in beautiful HD!) and WifeGeeding and I just watched all 12 episodes of “From Earth to the Moon.” Here are two items of interest:
The salary for an astronaut in the “moon program” was $20,000. When I entered that figure in the Inflation Calculator using a date of 1972 that equates to $111,665 in 2008. Today they earn between $65,140 and $100,701 per year. Source
Eugene Cernan of Apollo 17 told his nine-year-old daughter that he was going to engrave her initials on the moon. At the time, she didn’t think it was a big deal.
Before Cernan left the moon on the Apollo 17 mission he remembered his daughter in a special way. “I drove the Rover about a mile away from the LM and parked it carefully so the television camera could photograph our takeoff the next day. As I dismounted, I took a moment to kneel and with a single finger, scratched [my daughter] Tracy’s initials, ‘TDC,’ in the lunar dust, knowing those three letters would remain there undisturbed for more years than anyone could imagine.â€Â Link
On Earth we call that graffiti.