I had a fantastic time appearing on the Colbert Report. You can watch the video of my segment of the show here.

I’m getting ready to appear on one of my favorite TV shows, The Colbert Report, on April 4 on Comedy Central (tune in at 11:30 p.m. Eastern/Mountain/Pacific Time and 10:30 p.m. Central Time). I’ll be talking about the current and future space program, and my book, A Passion for Mars.

The great space artist Paul Calle died yesterday at age 82. As a NASA artist he documented the early space program with a rare mix of passion and precision. With works like the portrayal of the first space rendezvous shown above, Paul captured as no one else the excitement of that incredible time. I was fortunate to have known him and to have enjoyed his warmth, wit, and tremendous spirit. Here is the introduction I wrote for an collection of his Apollo works, published last year.

You don’t usually know years ahead of time that the most incredible event of your life is coming up. But if you grew up in the 1960s and you were a space nut, you knew. I remember thinking sometime around the summer of 1966 that there were less than four years to go until Apollo astronauts would be walking on the moon. In the summer of 1966 I was ten years old, and nothing mattered more to me than the space program. (Okay, the space program and the Beatles.) The missions of Project Gemini, NASA’s “bridge to the moon,” were going strong. Astronauts were walking in space, and doing space rendezvous, and staying in orbit for a week or even two weeks at a time. I couldn’t have asked for a better time to be a kid.

And the best part was the pictures. If the latest issue of LIFE or National Geographic arrived and it had a new set of space photos, the rest of the family didn’t get to see it very much, because I had it. I stared at the images from space, letting them transport me into a realm of black skies and brilliant sunlight, of white spacesuits and mirrored visors, of spaceships afloat in the void, with the Earth’s bright panorama beyond. But there was one thing those pictures could never do: They couldn’t document the feeling of that incredible time. They couldn’t record what it was like to be alive when humans were taking their first steps into an endless frontier, seeing what no one had ever seen, doing what had never been done. For that, we needed Paul Calle.

When I first encountered his work, in a NASA booklet on the Gemini missions that came out in 1966, I was immediately hooked. I had never seen anyone draw the way Paul did, with those bold pencil strokes defining shape and movement, capturing men and machines with uncanny realism. In his rendering of Gemini 6 and 7, nose-to-nose in history’s first space rendezvous, I could almost feel the blinding intensity of the unfiltered sunlight of outer space. And when he portrayed Gemini 7’s Frank Borman and Jim Lovell just back from their record-breaking, two-week space marathon, I sensed the mix of exhaustion and exhilaration that they must have felt as they stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier, bearded and weak-legged, savoring their triumph.

And it wasn’t just the astronauts I saw; it was the life force of everyone who sent them into space, from the engineers who created their magnificent flying machines to the orbital-mechanics wizards who figured out how two spacecraft traveling at 17,500 miles per hour could fly to within a foot of each other. Somehow, Paul’s vivid line work transmitted the electrifying excitement of the entire adventure; even the void of space seemed to vibrate with some kind of fantastic energy, like iron filings tracing the contours of a magnetic field. In those days, with the endless frontier opening up before us, it was almost impossible not to feel swept along by that same magnetic power, pulling you into a spectacular tomorrow. After all, we were going to the moon.

And when the day of that ultimate voyage finally arrived in the summer of 1969—the summer of Apollo—it was like the entire world stopped in its tracks to witness it. On that muggy July morning, as Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and Buzz Aldrin ate their last meal on Earth and put on their spacesuits, I was glued to the television. I could not have known that Paul Calle was there, with the three men who were about to leave the planet, quietly capturing his own unique pen-and-ink snapshots of the moment. But the next day, when I was poring over the coverage of the mission in the paper, I came to a full-page ad for one of the TV networks, featuring Paul’s superb pencil drawing of the first human footstep on another world—an event still hidden in the unknowable future, now only a few days away, but rendered as if it had already happened. And in the mind of Paul Calle, it had.

This picture marks a turning point for the human species: It’s the first photo made by a person that shows the entire Earth. It was taken by astronaut Bill Anders on December 21, 1968 from the moon-bound Apollo 8 spacecraft. If you’re having trouble figuring out what you’re looking at, don’t feel alone: Anders was confused, too, at first. You have to turn your head 90 degrees to the left to realize that the landmass to the right of center is South America, with North America above it, hidden by clouds, and the tip of western Africa about to disappear into night. Inside Apollo 8, Anders did something even better: he turned his entire weightless body until the view through the window suddenly became familiar.

When I interviewed Anders in 1987 for A Man on the Moon, I showed him this picture. He drew my attention to a small blue-green patch just off the tip of Florida: The shallow waters of the Bahamas (see inset). Anders called it “a turquoise jewel that you could see all the way to the moon…. It was like it was illuminated, like a piece of opal. And you could see that all the way. And I kept being amazed by that.”

I love that quote, and I made sure to include it in Voices from the Moon. It’s an explorer relating a very human moment during the most extraordinary of experiences. When I think about it, I get that precious feeling that I’m almost there myself. I feel an almost overwhelming sense of gratitude for the amazing recollections of Anders and the other men who went to the moon, and for the chances I’ve had to share those memories with everyone else.

I envy Steve Robinson. Not just because he’s an astronaut who’s flown in space and even walked in space, but because, as a fellow guitar player, I really wish I could try out his practice room. Last Feburary on the STS-130 mission, Robinson helped install the International Space Station’s “room with a view,” called the cupola. Recently I had a chance to ask Robinson what it was like in there, and he surprised me by saying that visually it was even more impressive than walking in space. The reason, he said, is that you have much more peripheral vision through the cupola’s “bay windows” than you do in a space helmet. And he pointed out that since our eyes’ motion-sensing receptors, the rods, are concentrated around the edges of our field of view, the cupola’s wide-screen panorama creates a more pronounced feeling of motion over the Earth than you get during a space walk. Even without a guitar, the cupola is an incredible place to be. And the only thing that would make it better, for me, would be the chance to make a bit of music while watching the Earth go by.

In December 2003 I took part in a closed-door roundtable discussion on NASA’s goals in space and how to relate them to the public, led by then NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe. Among the participants was filmmaker Jim Cameron, creator of such epics as Titanic, Terminator, and the upcoming Avatar. At one point, as I was voicing my frustration at NASA’s past failures to communicate its activities in a compelling way, Jim zeroed in on the real problem. “It’s not enough to tell the story,” he said. “You have to have a good story to tell.”

I thought of Jim’s comment the other day when I was watching spacewalking astronauts of the shuttle Atlantis repair and refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope. I sat there in front of my computer–none of the kaleidoscope of channels on Comcast were covering the event–and watched live video of the astronauts performing the equivalent of brain surgery on the beloved telescope, transcending the limitations of bulky spacesuits and stiff, pressurized gloves in an extraordinary weightless ballet. And once again, as I always do when the space program is at its best, I felt amazed, inspired–and grateful.

In short, I felt the way I almost never do any more when I watch astronauts working in space, even when the tasks are just as challenging, the views just as magnificent. Fixing Hubble, giving it new life and new capabilities, is the kind of thing that’s worth the cost and the risks of sending people into space. What we’ve gotten from that orbiting discovery machine, aesthetically as well as scientifically, is priceless. Yet, for all the engineering magnificence of the International Space Station–and, for that matter, the shuttle itself–it’s hard for me to avoid the feeling that all those flights, those countless hours of station-contruction spacewalks, haven’t gotten us much farther along the road to new explorations, new discoveries. Maybe someone out there will convince me I’m mistaken. But right now, I long for more missions like the Hubble repair, more good stories to tell.

Welcome to my new blog. I’m going to be talking about space exploration, and why after more than half a century it’s still one of the things that makes me glad to be alive.

This painting of the liftoff of a Saturn V moon rocket, Power to GO by the supremely talented artist Paul Calle, does a lot to show why I feel this way. It’s not just the sheer intensity of the moment, or even the incredible ingenuity that went into actually creating a moonship and getting it to work. It’s what it says about us humans, and our dreams, and what we’re capable of accomplishing when we pull together.

And it’s about where that rocket is going. Even now, when I think of the fact that the moon is no longer just a light in the sky but a place where people have been, and will return to, I feel the thrill of being on a grand continuum of exploration. I feel thankful that as a teenager I got to witness the voyages of Apollo as they were taking place, and that as an adult I could tell the story of Apollo through the eyes of the astronauts. Ultimately, one of the things that really “lights my candle,” to use Apollo 12 moonwalker Pete Conrad’s phrase, is the story we are all living through. It’s a story that has already spanned generations and will continue, I firmly believe, as long as humans exist, one that provides a spectacular context to our day-to-day lives.

What a story, and what a time to be alive.