Yesterday afternoon my family and I visited Fort McHenry National Monument, where the U.S. national anthem “The Star Spangled Banner” was born in 1814.

Our visit that day started wonderfully but ended unpleasantly when a National Park Service ranger aimed his taser at my father over… (drum roll) …an alleged dog-off-leash violation.

<Insert ironic statement about the location and nature of this incident. E.g. “So much for the ‘land of the free.’”>

At right is a picture of the vicious, nasty, terrifying, 14-pound and taser-worthy hell hound named Mac.

Mac tried to befriend the offending park ranger and his backup during the incident. After they ignored him, he eventually got bored and took a nap in the grass of the monument’s spacious east lawn.

Did the park ranger abuse his authority? That’s not my decision to make — I’ll leave that to his superiors and the courts. But the fact is he aimed a weapon at an unarmed person — aka my father — and shamed his family in broad daylight in a public park jam-packed with other families.

Make no mistake, this could have been a lethal confrontation. My father is not young, and even the low-amperage jolt of a taser can spur cardiac events.

I might take some heat for this post because, after having a weapon aimed at him, my dad lost his cool. He never threatened or attacked, but at the end of the incident he did yell at the rangers over their frightening and unwarranted use of force.

The rest of us didn’t fare much better in our adrenaline rush. Someone was threatening our family member and human instincts in moments of danger run deep. Until you’re in the thick of it, it’s impossible to know what angry or weird or silly things you’ll say or do.

Here’s what happened.

My parents drove from Ohio, and my fiance and I from New York, to visit my brother and his fiance in Baltimore. My brother was on leave from work in the Middle East.

He’s a history buff, so we decided to make our way to nearby Fort McHenry. It’s a patriotic place where 1,000 soldiers thwarted the British navy’s invasion during the War of 1812. We had a great time crawling into the guts of the fort, watching period actors marching around and enjoyed being around one another.

On our way out my parents took Mac for a walk in the public section of the park. Mac loves to play fetch. Because he was getting tangled up in his leash, I grabbed it from my dad, unclipped the leash and started to play a jubilant game of fetch with a tennis ball.

Out of nowhere a National Park Service ranger strolled from behind some trees. He asked us in a stern voice whose dog it was.

“It’s our dog. It’s the family’s dog,” I said, taken aback by the accosting tone of the man.

He proceeded to tell us having a dog off the leash was against the law. I hadn’t seen any posted signs about this and, up until this point, no park official of any kind had ever said anything to me about it. Plus, I thought I saw other dog owners in the park with their animals off-leash.

Looking to diffuse the situation and get on with our day, I blurted out submissive kindnesses like “I’m sorry” and “I didn’t know that” and “We’ll keep him on his leash from now on.” My dad put Mac back on his leash, keeping perfectly silent the whole time.

This is how the story should have ended: A family playing with their harmless, small dog being gently warned to keep it on a leash.

But that’s not how it played out.

The park ranger escalated. He demanded our licenses. And while the ranger almost certainly saw me take possession of Mac and unleash him from his tree-lined hiding spot, he handed my license back and kept my father‘s.

Why this happened is interesting. Very interesting, indeed.

We stood quietly while the ranger phoned a colleague, trying to read back — letter by letter — my dad’s name and license number. Farva must have been on the other end because it was approaching 10 minutes of waiting around.

Meanwhile, another ranger appeared on a bicycle and joined us on the grass.

My brother, father and I continued to putz around. I played with my phone. My dad looked up at the sky. We made small talk about how cold it had gotten, seeing condensation puffing out of Mac’s nostrils.

Now, the thing you must know about my dad is that he can have a short fuse. He’ll never throw or attack or doing anything physical, but he does get loud and cranky. So he was doing really, really well. (My mom remarked afterward how well he had done, given the circumstances, and that’s saying a lot.)

My father is also a joker. To break the growing tension and outlandishness of what was happening, he turned to my baffled mother and began a brief comedy routine. “Sorry, honey, they’re going to arrest me. I’ll see you at the jail,” he said, chuckling while turning back to the park rangers.

They were stone-faced.

At this point the officer began writing a ticket while speaking with the person on his phone. Minutes later my dad courteously asked the ranger if he could have his license back, take his ticket and get on with his day because this was getting silly and he wanted to spend time with his family.

In a sort of harrumph, my dad stuck his now-freezing hands in his jacket pockets.

The ranger completely lost his shit. He screamed at my dad to pull his hands out of his pockets and stand back, all the while fingering what looked like a gun in a holster. My dad said something like, “I have nothing in my pockets, my hands are cold,” and took them out as he stepped back.

I began fumbling with my phone to get its camera up and running. My brother — always the diplomat — walked toward my dad,  grasped his arm and began pulling him away from the ranger. With their backs partially turned, the male ranger pulled out his taser and aimed it at my father.

I understand law enforcement agents just want to make it home at the end of their shift each day, and you never know what someone might do in the face of oppressive authority.

But context is critical.

We were nice. We didn’t know about the law, and clipped the leash back on right away. We were then patient and courteous while waiting to get my father’s license back. Right up to the point that the ranger screamed at us and drew his weapon.

I’m sorry, but an older man walking a small dog, cracking dorky jokes with his family and sticking his freezing hands in his pockets is not an invitation for potentially deadly force.*

To the National Park Service and Fort McHenry:

1. There was absolutely no place for this behavior here.
2. Please don’t hire aggressive, antisocial and reckless people who are prone to abuse their authority.
3. Please train the rangers you do hire adequately before sending them into the public with weapons.
4. You’ll be hearing from us soon.

* Adding insult to injury: The park ranger forged my father’s signature on the $75.00 ticket.

Images: 1) Armed and dangerous with a 14-pound dog on a leash and a fold-up stool. (Copyright of Dave Mosher) 2) Mac the Destroyer. (Copyright of Dave Mosher) 3) My dad and a famous Middle Eastern political figure. (left: Copyright of Dave Mosher; right: Wikipedia)

I’ll keep this short: I decided to give my boring computer background a makeover.

Naturally, this space dork grabbed some of his favorite images of the universe and cut them down to 1920×1200.

Below is a gallery of space things you, too, can use as computer backgrounds for your widescreen monitor.

Enjoy!

Want to hear something crazy? The Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago is hosting a contest called Month at the Museum 2 for one lucky roommate to live, breathe and eat science within their walls for 30 days and 30 nights.

The winner would serve as the face of MSI Chicago during the day. At night, it’s nerd vs. museum: Submarines, spacesuits, Apollo 8, airplanes, a fairy castle, plastinates, tornadoes, a coal mine and even a little town. For their troubles? $10,000 and a pile of gadgets.

Two months ago I applied, and the craziness has now reached fever-pitch: I’m one of six of MATM2 finalists.

The museum whittled the competition down from about 1,000 talented, charismatic and very nerdy people who applied, but they now want your feedback.

If you think MSI needs a lot of Dave Mosher in its life, please vote once per day, now through Oct. 3, 2011 at MonthAtTheMuseum.org I’ll be at the museum the morning of Oct. 5, where they’ll announce the winner during a live event.

It literally takes seconds to cast a vote, but if you’re like me you may forget. So I’ve crafted these daily calendar reminder buttons to help you out — one click and you’re good to go:

• Tuesday 9/27:
• Wednesday 9/28:
• Thursday 9/29:
• Friday 9/30:
• Saturday 10/1:
• Sunday 10/2:
• Monday: 10/3:

Note: User of other calendar software? Save this .ics file to your computer and open it.

Entering this contest wasn’t for faint of heart*. I think it’s safe to say every entrant poured some serious blood, sweat and tears into their submissions in hopes of a finalist spot (and, of course, the ultimate spot). That means I’m incredibly honored, severely humbled and insanely excited to be this far along. It also means I’d love to carry my comrades’ torches and pounce on this once-in-a-lifetime science/technology adventure with everything I’ve got, and then some!

Kate McGroarty won last year and tore it up for museum visitors and for people across the Interwebs. I’m ready to follow in her footsteps, but I want to amp everything up, mix everything up and try some new things.

Again, it’s not over yet. I need your help! At the risk of shooting myself in the foot, I urge you to vote often for the very best person. Hopefully you think that’s me.

* Infinite thanks to everyone who has without question (er, too many questions) supported my application to this crazy contest in some way, shape or form. Not the least of which includes: Kendra, Weeze, Arikia, Robert, Sean, John, Noah, Sharon, Irene, Wayne, Abbey, Betsy, Brandon, mom, dad and the rest of my brilliant family and friends.

Last week, for instance, I strolled into a room to collect my free Andrea Bocelli concert ticket and T-shirt. No mediums or smalls in sight. Just box upon box of large, XL and XXL. Being the scrawny lad I am, I left disappointed.

Why does this happen every single time?

I’m not here to poke fun at those struggling with a larger-than-desirable figure. Au contraire. I’m simply posing a question that has, apparently, stumped the brightest minds of this planet since the T-shirt screamed into popularity in the late 19th century (thanks, Europe).

The human race has done well up to this point. We’ve already solved the how-to-board-the-airplane-quickly problem, the my-table-is-wobbly problem and other civilization-crushing conundrums. Surely, then, some grand theorem exists that could save T-shirts from the waste bin?

Nope. I’ve searched the scientific literature far and wide, and nothing is to be found.

I think this problem is unresolved because it touches so many disparate fields of knowledge. Before we get into that, however, let’s set the scene — a sort of Schrödinger’s cat scenario. Or one of those open-ended problems we all groaned about in high school:

Congratulations!

You are the T-shirt-ordering person for a 5K charity walk through Central Park. This event should attract an estimated 1,000 adults who just so happen to be a perfectly random subset of New Yorkers within the five boroughs.

As they walk across the finish line, each participant will receive a shirt. Thanks to foolish event organizers, however, you will not know their size before that moment and need to order the shirts a couple weeks ahead of time.

You are the last hope for properly-clothed humanity. How many small, medium, large, XL and XXL T-shirts do you order?

Here are a few fields this touches (at a minimum):

• Statistics. Data rules. We need to know who lives ’round these parts and what T-shirt sizes they wear. Although the CDC and city governments do keep by-the-zipcode estimates of body mass indexes, these data aren’t the most precise for guessing T-shirt sizes. Can we get any more detailed?
• Business. To stay open, stores must know their clientele to an extreme degree, including the distributions of clothing sizes they wear and end up buying (whether it actually fits them or not). So we could shop around here for more precise data. If online retailers would share their data, we might even drill down to specific zones within zipcodes. But people wanting to buy something a suit for a job interview or, say, walk a few miles for charity are different beasts.
• Psychology. To get the right number of shirts, we need to get inside people’s heads.
  First, there are the takers of T-shirts. How many S, M, L, XL and XXLs are likely to show up for a 5K walk in the city? What about one held in the spring vs. the fall? What’s the charity being supported? Who will actually pick up a T-shirt? Will some people try and nab two or three?
  Then there are the people who actually order the shirts. We need to consider how their biases might affect their orders of different sizes. Are they concerned primarily with making sure everyone can fit into a shirt — even if it’s three sizes too large? Do they subscribe to the “oh, it’ll shrink” mentality to justify the extra over-sized shirts? Does the size of T-shirt they wear factor in?

…And so on. Anyone ready to get to work? There’s money to be made here. And happiness for me, because I might actually be able to find a T-shirt in my size (thank you very much).

Think about it, T-shirt manufacturers: If you can come up with a I-have-no-idea-how-many-shirts-to-order algorithm for clueless clients, I’d bet my bottom dollar you’d quickly become the number-one supplier through a surge of referrals.

Until then, I’ll keep dragging boxes of night shirts over to a charity.

Image: spaceamoeba/Flickr

From the vantage of a bike ride through three NYC borroughs, however, the city seems to have emerged mostly unscathed. Sans a few unlucky cars (see below).

In the days before Irene’s landfall, Kendra and I nested hardcore in our sixth-floor Queens apartment. We stocked up the refrigerator and pantry, busted out the candles and even did that apocalypse-ready maneuver of filling up the bathtub with water.

Along with our stranded special guest Lou Woodley of Nature (Irene swallowed up her hopes of returning to England Saturday night), we hunkered  down with some hurricane cocktails and a Harry Potter marathon.

That night we felt ready. Yet even with reports of Irene’s weakening, the rain spraying the windows and the wind howling through unseen cracks didn’t make for restless sleeping.

Our anxiety peaked around 4:00am this morning. That’s when Brookhaven National Laboratory’s automated emergency system called Kendra’s phone and told her about some tornadoes on Long Island. Yay.

You can prepare for excessive rain, horrific gusts of wind, no electricity and no water, but tornadoes? Not so much. You can only run like hell, half-asleep and half-naked, toward a basement and hope the building doesn’t collapse on you or impale you with broken window glass and debris.

Alas, we finally did fall asleep and awoke this morning to a bit of sunshine. A glance at an uplifting weather report later, curiosity bested us. We hopped on our bikes and pedaled around to survey the damage.

I think it was one of the best bike rides ever. With a nice cool breeze on our backs, we milled up and down the eerily empty and quiet streets. Few cars and pedestrians were to be found, but plenty of interesting sights were.

We spied half a dozen of Irene’s felled trees and fallen branches, however. Click the image below for a small Flickr gallery of our trip.

The third time is a charm, the saying goes.

I hope so.

I’m in Detroit for Kendra’s high school reunion, but it didn’t stop me from squeezing out a bit of writing. Below is my third raw and unedited submission to Longshot Magazine, whose ordained theme for this issue is debt.  The previous two stories I sent in perished during editorial review: one about the New Horizons spacecraft (for the hustle-themed issue) and the next about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (for the comeback issue).

This time I stepped away from science and did a little in-family reporting on my last name. Which may or may not be Mosher, thanks to our gambling-rich bloodline.

I want to be skeptical that the core story is true, but something tells me that it is.

Anyway, enjoy. As an added bonus, I’ve posted the conversation I had with my father.

The Family Debt

DETROIT — Every family harbors a figurative closet of skeletons. The bizarre relatives, deep abscesses of financial debt and unspeakable acts. My family is no different.

Yet one piece of history that creeps in the shadow of the Mosher namesake is a curious claim bordering on the unbelievable. If true, my last name is not real, and the byline of this article is, technically speaking, an error.

Bits and pieces of the fable have reached my ears over the past 27 years, but Longshot’s theme drove me to seek the full, grown-up truth. So I called up my father, Ed Mosher, who lives in Ohio.

The story begins with a New York City furniture store owner named James.

James begat Edward around 1900, and Edward begat Jim during the Great Depression. And then Jim had my father Ed in 1954. My father followed suit and named my older brother James. James – Edward – Jim – Ed – James.

“The ones named James are the only ones successful in business and economics,” my father jokes.

My great, great granddad James was born into one of the first Lebanese families to immigrate to New York. His father beat his kin there, most of whom poured in at the turn of the 19th century, and raised his son to be a opportunistic businessman. James opened a furniture store some time in the late 1800s, and he had ample sales with other immigrant families.

But another successful family business was rising around the same time — the American Mafia.

My father blames the gambling-prone blood that courses through his side of our family, but James may have leveraged his store to squeeze a more comfortable existence out of an unforgiving metropolis. Whatever the reason, James tied himself financially to organized crime.

James’ debt with the Mafia stacked up, and the Great Depression struck. Suddenly, people needed food and a modest place to sleep — not furniture. The stress crushed James, and he died of a heart attack.

In addition to a coffin, James left behind a cold pile of IOUs addressed to criminals. This was not any ordinary debt, but the kind that follows a bloodline.

After James’ death, the mob bosses promptly informed Edward (my great grandfather) of his new arrears. Edward didn’t have any money or substantial assets, so he fled here, to Detroit, in the 1930s. A burgeoning ghetto called Delray become home, and it was there he changed his last name to Mosher and raised a family.

We don’t know our real last name for certain, but Bill Mosher, my great uncle, strongly believes it was Moushar. Considering our Lebanese roots, it’s plausible. Whatever the namesake, Edward made it Mosher “to make his name sound more American,” says my dad, and avoid the Mafia’s gun-toting bill collectors.

Decades of time have thinned but not washed away our family’s true debt: Our gambling heritage.

My grandfather Jim was a legendary gambler and, in his last great bet on the river boats of Cincinnati, signed a promissory note for his 65-acre farm over to Dick Skinner — the same bookie who had dealings with the fallen Reds player Pete Rose. Jim lost the farm and his second wife, and he died a drunk. And my father tells me that, although he never liked gambling, something deep inside of him lurches when glancing at a slot machine.

“I feel safest playing the dollar changer,” says my dad. “That’s only risk I’m willing to take.”

We’ll carry the Moushar’s debt with us forever — an IOU in the form of a name. But us Moshers? We don’t mind. We’re a different kind of family now.

All is forgiven.

Audio: An interview with my dad, Ed Mosher, on July 30, 2011. (MP3)

Image: Delray, Michigan. (Notorious4life/Wikipedia)

You have 30 days to squeeze every ounce of awesome out of one of the biggest, baddest museums on Earth.

What would you do?

That’s what the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago asked hopefuls for the institution’s second and final “Month at the Museum” contest.

Being the über-curious and outgoing science reporter that I am, I couldn’t resist. My (hopefully) dark horse entry galloped into the stable of applications before the gates closed yesterday.

One part of the application called for a 60-second video showing off you + your creativity. For the $0.00 production above, I braved grumpy security guards, dodged speeding trains, fought sleep and turned my back on the last-ever space shuttle launch.

But 60 seconds wasn’t nearly enough time for this starry-eyed applicant.

MSI Chicago did provide extra room in a 12-page application and 500ish-word essay, yet those, too, weren’t enough for me to gush about why and how I’d tackle this crazy assignment.

Hence, this post: a public addendum to my official MSI sales pitch.

As a freelance journalist, I craft news about science and technology for a (humble) living, and I strive to do it in the most engaging, digestible and fun ways possible.

I can’t complain too much. I’m incredibly grateful to have visited some seriously cool places during my 5-years-and-counting career. But I do spend 99 percent of my working hours pounding the keys at a desk while my eyeballs turn to goo from my staring down a computer screen.

I’m ready for a curve ball. A hands-on, incredibly challenging and transformational adventure. A once-in-a-lifetime reporting experience that will push every creative and inquisitive bone in my body. And I want to take people along for the ride, no matter where they happen to be.

It’s tough to imagine anything better than living in a giant museum for an entire month and hanging out with its guests.

There’s some steep competition out there, but I hope the museum sees a lot of Dave Mosher in its future. Positioned in my corner: Insatiable curiosity about the universe (the heartbeat of any sci/tech reporter). Friendliness toward complete strangers (hello, world!). Honed reporting skills (text, photos, video, social media — you name it, I do it). A thirst for adventure (let my MATM application serve as evidence).

I’d love to bundle that up and leverage it to document the heck out of my journey and inspire anybody who tags along with me.

Let’s build on Kate McGroarty’s explorations and try some new things. A few ideas, at the risk of tipping off my competition:

• How’d this get here? – The incredible stories of museum artifacts. From colossal aircraft to a miniaturized furniture, everything has a fascinating history. How did the museum acquire it? How’d it get inside the walls? Any bizarre tales of its creation? Strange previous owners? Etc.
• Museumoramas – Ever heard of GigaPan? If not, it’s a robot that quickly takes dozens of pictures and stitches them into a single zoomable image. Let’s use the system to capture some ridiculously cool, high-resolution panoramas of the museum both during and after hours.
• Scary Science to Explain in the Dark – My stay would fall right around Halloween. How about a scary nighttime video series to cover the creepier things in the museum? Think scary campfire stories. Except no campfire and great explanations of how stuff works.
• MSI Live – If Ustream.tv or other live video services are allowed, let’s host a 15-to-30 minute show every few days from the glass cube (below). I’d answer people’s most pressing questions, tell them cool stories they haven’t seen or read yet, and maybe do some on-camera science demos.
• Visitor of the Day – A quick post all about a visitor I bumped into during the day. Who are they? Why’d they come in? What’s their favorite exhibit so far? What their biggest-ever question about science?
• Where’s Dave? – Stick a simple GPS tracker on me and overlay my real-time location on a map of the museum posted to the Internet. That way anyone — visitors, museum staff, whomever — can stalk me by using their computer or smartphone.
• Dave’s Tricky Techy Treasure - I hid a special, techy treat in the museum. To find it, you’ll have to follow my clues on Twitter and Facebook…

…And that’s just scratching the surface. Think of all the wild, crazy and fun things we can do together, and the thousands (millions?) we can inspire along the way.

Whaddya say, MSI Chicago? Can I be the boy in the glass box?

Video: Dave Mosher/YouTube

Images: MSI Chicago

Yesterday, months of planning culminated into the world’s nerdiest marriage proposal.

I asked Kendra Snyder to marry me in the opened-up guts of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. (Where Kendra works as a science writer/communicator/public information officer-type.)

More specifically, I asked her on scaffolding below the center of RHIC’s 1,200-ton STAR detector. This house-sized machine examines the hot soup of energy present just moments after the Big Bang, which physicists recreate by colliding gold ions near the speed of light.

Make as many symbolic interpretations as you’d like — I chose the location for a lot of reasons! — but the truth is I wanted us to have a great story to tell. A ridiculously nerdy, epic and smile-prompting story.

So how did things go down? Here’s the skinny from each of our perspectives.

Kendra:

The "crystalline deposit."

Kendra goes about her normal Friday afternoon routine. Things are winding down and she’s looking forward to coming home.

Just before 4:00 p.m., Kendra’s boss Pete pulls her aside to say he has received an unusual phone call from a physicist at RHIC. The physicist — aka Bill — found a rare crystalline deposit in RHIC’s beamline at the STAR detector, he says, and needs her to go down and see if it’s worth writing a story about.

Conveniently, Pete and all of Kendra’s other coworkers are tied up. Even Kendra’s eager intern turns down the opportunity to see this bizarre deposit and the giant detector.

How weird, Kendra thinks.

After a 5-minute drive, she meets Bill the physicist at the fiveish-story loading dock outside of the detector’s chamber. Bill starts to spout mumbo-jumbo about beamline metals, collision energies, crystallization environments, chemical reactions, and so on. They walk behind an enormous concrete radiation shield and there is the colossal detector, recently opened up for its usual summer maintenance period.

They walk up a dual staircase and onto a platform just below the particle beamline. “And that’s the kind of crystal we found,” says Bill, and quickly scurries down the other side of the staircase. It’s a diamond ring in a box.

Kendra shouts in disbelief as Dave appears out of nowhere behind her. He grabs the box, takes a kneel and does the deed.

Outside the detector room, dozens of Kendra’s coworkers await to celebrate with cake and champagne.

Dave:

The "Operation Smash" team, from top to bottom: Bill, Pete, Zeynep, Kendra and Dave.

Dave gets up just as Kendra’s leaving their apartment, around 7:00 a.m., and starts baking a cake. A few hours later he gathers up his camera, video gear, the cake and a few other important items (i.e. the ring), then runs out the door to catch a train to Brookhaven.

Oops — the subway is all messed up, so he hails a cab. The cab asks where Dave is going, and Dave makes the mistake of telling him just a few blocks. Off drives the cab driver.

Dave runs to the other side of the street thinking he’ll find a less grumpy cab driver, but strikes out. In a public transportation Hail Mary, he hops on the bus — the wrong bus — and hops off. Then he kills precious minutes waiting for the right bus.

The right bus is a circus. It’s slow, people are paying in nickels, and Dave thinks, “My crap, I could ROLL to the train station faster than this.” He misses his train, and grumpily kills time in a cafe, where he hops on his computer and fools Kendra into thinking he’s at work.

Luckily, Dave catches the next train. But unluckily, his four one-way tickets are all expired.

The overzealous conductor decides to show his trainee how to ruin someone’s day. I don’t have enough cash to pay off this conductor, thinks Dave, followed by lots of internal monologue filled with !@#$s and %^&*s. But he does, forks over the $14.00, and gets picked up by Zeynep, Kendra’s friend/coworker, at the train station around 1:30 p.m.

They waste little time alerting the other troops that Dave’s secret plan is in motion. Dave and Zeynep head over to STAR for a dry run where Bill the physicist awaits.

After hiding the cake, some champagne, a video camera and Zeynep (who’s armed with a big dSLR camera), Dave ducks behind a wall and waits for Kendra.

As she walks through the door and into the detector room, Dave sneaks up behind her and — right as she sees the ring — grabs it and kneels down.

And they lived as huge nerds happily ever after.

Goodies at the after party right outside STAR's big radiation wall.

Video: Dave Mosher

Images: Dave Mosher and Zeynep Altinbas

I wanted to post this prior to launch, so it’s a day late (and a few thousand dollars in production value short). Fast-forward to the end for the launch from the press mound.

This is it, folks. The final space shuttle launch is upon us.

The glorified freight truck Atlantis launches Friday, July 8 at 11:26 a.m. EDT, and four lucky astronauts are hitching a ride. Once the crew gets up to a speed of about 17,500 mph — fast enough to keep them in continuous free fall — they’ll tag up with the International Space Station, perform a bread-and-butter mission, and coast back to Earth a couple weeks later.

I’m now a stone’s throw away from Kennedy Space Center* and parachuting into one of the geekiest and longest-lived reporting heritages on Earth, along with a veritable circus of other news media types.

My aim in this is simple: To document the end of a significant and contentious phase of human history. But I want to crowdsource the effort a bit.

I have a camera, a camcorder and my furious writing fingers. What would you have me do with these tools? Sky’s (not) the limit.

Helping me out is coverage of a few space shuttle missions. Enough to ask important dumb questions and convince hapless fools into speaking on the record with me. Certainly not enough, however, to pretend to be one of the big kids who’ve covered spaceflight for decades.

So beyond the standard fare of stories I’ll write to pay the bills, I’m experimenting and exploring new ideas and mediums. Not something perhaps I, nor regular spaceflight reporters, ever have time for during the chaos of mission coverage.

Consider me your ears and eyes.

And don’t be shy — I’ve started a public thread on Google+ to gather ideas for content you’d like to see me churn out, but you’re welcome to use this post or email me to chime in.

Image: NASA/Jim Grossman

* I could have done without the maelstrom of flight delays from thunderstorms, missing pilots and busy runways. And thanks for putting me up, Irene (every hotel in Florida, it seems, is booked solid on account of the launch).