Space language

[cosmolinguist]

My crash nap yesterday after work meant I was still awake when the Artemis 2 launch window opened. I'd gone to bed but hadn't been able to sleep so figured I'd come back downstairs to watch it with D, but he came up with his laptop so we could watch it in bed on a biggish screen. Which worked out great: it was very fun to watch it snuggled up together.

My Apollo-era space nerdery and his experience with Kerbal Space Program mesh into an excited understanding of, at a generous estimate, half of what is being said on the broadcast. I imagined clutching a phrasebook as we toddle around the land of spaceflight, garishly dressed tourists trying to look in every direction at once in both excitement and confusion. ("PRM" is an acronym I'm used to hearing at work every so often, but in my line of work it doesn't mean perigee raise maneuver!)

An online pal said "I am clearly not the only one looking up 'perigee' on Merriam-Webster's website lol" and shared a screenshot of a list I immediately fell in love with: that dictionary's current top lookups were

1. Artemis
2. apogee
3. perigee
4. Godspeed
5. nominal
6. how
7. verklempt

It just gets better the more you read -- even the random how in there is somehow part of what makes it so delightful.