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Show It's not fair. Fly ME to the moon, please - h)t-$ yr O O O O O O O 0 the editor COlfffltH By MAKC HADDOCK It's just not fair, Jake! All of my life, at least ever since I can remember, I've dreamt of taking one, just one, trip to space. Is that too much to ask? And now you are going. I watched the early accomplishments ac-complishments of our astronauts with a mixture of admiration and envy. And when I was about eight, my parents presented me with the best Christmas present a boy ever had; my own Cape Canaveral complete with rockets, launching pads and little men to send into space. It came with a record the countdown count-down and lift off of John Glenn's historic flight into space -- a record that I listened over and over again as, in my mind's eye, I recreated that space launch. A few years later, when the folks brought home a large cardboard box and took out whatever was inside it. was soon transformed into a spa capsule complete with a homemade console complete with a container for what I considered to be the ideal space food - tiny pieces of chewing gum covered with candy. I stocked up a light-year's supply. I would disappear into the box for hours at a time as I would blast off, orbit and splash down. And I hoped has logged a lot of hours in it-He it-He has worked hard to keephiml in shape. And he is the chairman,' senate subcommittee that has i" to do with the funding ihaikwp)1i; National Aeronautics and Administration airborne. He's just one of those people', happens to be in the right plat,, the right time, with the right sin' to pull. And he's going lo gel in space. A school teacher will follow it eventually a journalist, since ji publicity has a definite cldm funding as well as U.S. senators. But the journalist probably w be a newspaperman from a sma town in Utah -especially not ami of-shape newspaperman with a fh: of heighths whose only flight ti perience has been on the aisleseai i . a Boeing 707. ' 'And so," I'll probably never jc there - at least not through newspaper route (ouch! i. But Jake is going, and ii jt doesn't seem fair. Gosh, do you think I should run Ik office? There are bound to be a Ink! people who would like to send me ii the moon. I'll even promise 1 won't come back. for the real thing to come along. The interest in space travel matured,, rather than waned,, with age. Soon science fiction novels were taking me on journeys to other' solar1 systems and galaxies even though Neil Armstrong had not yet set foot on the moon. There were more models, more books and more dreams about reaching out beyond the confines of the envelope of air that defines our earthly habitat - but the dreams became more fanciful as the reality of space flight became more tangible. The idealism of youth gave way to the facts of life - while a lot of people might get into space before I would die, I would not be one of them; ' r' I was no test pilot, nor even an astrophysicist. I wasn't even a politician. You wouldn't think that would matter, unless you considered the case of Jake Garn, who has been told he will be the first senator in space. Not that Jake isn't qualified for the job. He is a military pilot who |