MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“Time for another giant leap into space”, Ellis Henican Column, Newsday, April 29, 2012
Let’s go somewhere fun.
How does Mars sound? Or Pluto? I don’t care, anywhere that’s far, different and feels like somewhere once we get there. For a good long while now, NASA has been having trouble getting the trip-planning formula quite right.
It’s been almost 43 years since Apollo 11 landed on the moon. And where has NASA been flying lately? Oh, right. I almost forgot. On commuter runs to the International Space Station,
where the astronauts would do a few experiments, perform some maintenance chores, wave goodbye and head quietly home. Not too many giant leaps for mankind. No rocky souvenirs at all.
Clearly, there’s still a huge public appetite for space travel. You saw the throngs on Friday, staring skyward as the Space Shuttle Enterprise buzzed low across New York on one of the great piggyback rides of all time. The future museum attraction even looped above the Roosevelt Field Mall, a flying hat tip to the former airfield where Charles Lindbergh took off for Paris in 1927.
The Enterprise was just a practice craft. It never achieved a day of orbit. And yet, associated as it is with a once-glorious space program, it still hinted at all the high-flying possibilities Up There.
Surely, we can do better than an orbiting confab of Russians and Chinese.
Venus, anyone?
SPACE PACE
1. 10, 9, 8, et cetera
2. One small step, then another small step
3. Armstrong, Aldrin and some other guy
4. Up, up and maybe it went that way
5. It’s a bird, it’s a plane — it’s a 747 carrying a retired space shuttle to a tourist aircraft carrier on the west side of Manhattan
THE NEWS IN SONG
ASKED AND UNANSWERED
Have you been called at home by “the Water Department,” threatening a non-payment shut-off? Don’t pay! It’s a scam, 
says Mineola Mayor Scott Strauss…Worst acronym ever? Can you beat TVASNAC, the Town-Village Aircraft Safety and Noise Abatement Committee repping residents around (just three letters) JFK?…After May 22, will Smithtown Central School District be proud – or chagrinned – to install breathalyzers in school?…Real dentists have enough trouble getting patients to make their appointments. How did alleged fake dentist Manuel Carranza do it at his New Cassel home?…Does the expanding Walt Whitman mall, with Henri Bendel and Swarovksi on the way, really need that $3-million Suffolk County tax break?…How much agape are Nick 
Cosmo’s out-of-luck investors feeling these days for the convicted Agape World Ponzi schemer? $400 million worth? That’s where his lieutenants are putting the take…If Nassau County installed an ozone monitor, would the air test any cleaner than Suffolk’s “smoggiest in New York State”? The American Lung Association can’t say…Don’t any other Southampton boys want to play field hockey? Until they do, 13-year-old Keeling Pilaro will keep pushing hard to play on the girls’ team…With forecasters predicting a below-average Atlantic-hurricane season, what extra-wimpy names do this year’s storms deserve? Hurricane Aw-don’t-worry-about-it? Hurricane Be-calm-it’s-going-somewhere-else? Hurricane Category Zero?
LONG ISLANDER OF THE WEEK
PETE FORNATALE
His final gigs was at Fordham’s WFUV and satellite’s SiriusXM. But Pete Fornatale was very much a Long Island guy. From Port Washington and then Rockaway Park, he helped invent, to spread and to perpetuate the whole idea of progressive music radio. He made his biggest mark at free-form rock pioneer WNEW-FM, but his impact was undeniable across the years. He was a taste-maker and an enthusiast, a discoverer and a confidante, a lover and sharer of just great music. He died at 66 of complications from a stroke. There’s one fewer reminder now of how great radio could be.
E-mail ellis@henican.com
Follow him at twitter.com/henican
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