Some time ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert Ballard, the man who discovered the ships the Titanic and the Bismarck and who was responsible for finding chemosynthetic bacteria on the ocean’s surface – thus ushering in a new era of exploration on the seafloor.

We talked about pushing the limits of human exploration, about man’s constant search to push beyond the limits of what is currently known, and how that drive has created the world we live in today, complete with its technology and its medicine and all that. This was a man who was and still is at the forefront of his chosen field, and whose name has become known to everyone around the world because he chose to push himself.

There were some other great parts of the interview, too – about finding perfectly preserved wooden ships at the bottom of the Black Sea and so on – but those are stories for a different time.

In any case, last Friday I got to spend some time talking with William ‘Billy O’ Oefelein, the pilot on the last Space Shuttle mission. You don’t get many opportunities to talk to real astronauts, because – as opposed to other childhood-memory careers like ‘fireman’ and ‘policeman’ and baseball player’ – there just aren’t that many astronauts. He was full of bons mots like ‘The history of humankind has always been about exploration, and that’s what we need to do with space’ and ‘it’s fun to tell people why we continue space exploration, because it’s an investment in our future.’

His accompanying photo was one of those ‘that looks really, really super hip’ moments, since he’s just, you know, floating in space with the Earth visible behind him.

Apparently being an astronaut isn’t all fun and games and Space Shuttle flights, though. He’d been working for NASA for more than eight years … and in that time, he’s done one 13-day mission. Let’s do some quick math:

(8 years)(365 days) = 2920 days.
13 days / 2920 days = 0.45 percent working days

In the three-and-a-half years that I’ve been at my job, that ratio is like me publishing a magazine for five-and-three-quarters days. Just 5.75 days out of 1,277. But the payoff of being shot into space is probably a more exhilarating experience than, you know, putting out an issue.

Oh … and apparently astronauts have blogs, too – finally bringing the power of instant publishing to space. It’s about time.