Neil Armstrong is, as anyone educated outside of the United States knows, the first man on the moon. For some bizarre reason, most Americans appear to have conflated an old OJ Simpson movie with actual fact, and believe that Neil never actually left a Hollywood Basement, but, hey, there's 50 years of crappy educational policy for you. Fortunately, people in other countries tend to remember important stuff for us these days, since we can't be bothered.

Thanks to the amazing scientific principle known as "low budget," the universe is utterly littered with earth-like worlds, all of which seem to support life pretty much exactly like here, only with goofier foreheads. It has long been a source of annoyance to me that few in visual SF seem the least bit interested in the fact that the universe *isn't* much like earth, and in fact that's what makes it interesting in the first place.

Though the US no longer has a manned space program (Thank you very much, Mr. Anti-science president), we've still got some unmanned programs. Of course the NASA end of that is kinda' sucking fumes as the Obama administration's plans to turn the agency into a theme park continue apace.

Humanity has been tooling around in space for half a century now, and quite a few people have made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of a frontier that most folks basically couldn't seem the least bit interested in. I think it's important to remember them, however, and so I present a list of fallen heroes in alphabetical order, without any of my usual editorializing.

MICHAEL J. ADAMS, American Pilot. One flight. Born 5/5/1930, died 11/15/1967. Died due to a technical failure on a flight of the third X-15 rocketplane.