Saturday, August 24, 2019

First Chipmunk to Orbit the Moon


My cousin Vinnie the P. spent July binge watching all of the specials on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing program. He noticed that dogs, monkeys, humans and even single cell organisms have flown in space but no chipmunks. He applied for a grant to the National Chipmunk Science Foundation on a whim and prayer. He was utterly surprised to get a call telling him a grant for a million sunflower seeds had been approved to send a chipmunk into space.

Vinnie was ecstatic about the news until he realized he didn’t know anything about rocket science. My cousin is not one to back down from a challenge. He bought a bunch of old NASA Saturn rocket technical manuals he found on Ebay and got to work. He scaled it down to chipmunk size (it saved a lot of money on fuel costs).

Recently, we discovered some spies trying to steal Vinnie’s rocket plans. Mom found some discarded chicken wire fencing along the road and built a secured facility for the Woodpile’s Moon program. Within less than a month Vinnie had his first prototype rocket ready for a test launch. I grabbed my camera to document the historic event.

You will notice the colorful paint scheme on the rocket. Vinnie thought the white paint used by NASA lacked imagination.


During a pre-launch check Vinnie discovers a problem: the rockets is leaning at an angle


Vinnie looks very worried about this problem.

 

Vinnie checks under rocket to see what the problem is.



Having discovered the problem he chirps out orders to the engineering team.



Vinnie inspects the repaired rocket



The test flight went well. Vinnie skipped ahead to the manned-flight phase using 
a bigger version of his rocket. How did it go? Well, Vinnie just tweeted this selfie
from the command module.





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