My obsession with space really started as a kid in the 90s, somewhere between watching Star Wars and completely wearing out my imagination with the movie SpaceCamp. Star Wars made space feel mythic, with X-wings screaming across the stars, the Millennium Falcon jumping to hyperspace, strange planets, droids, alien worlds, and the idea that adventure was waiting somewhere far beyond the sky. It wasn’t just a movie universe to me. It felt like an invitation.
Then SpaceCamp came along and made that dream feel a little more real. Suddenly space wasn’t only lightsabers and starships. It was kids climbing into simulators, learning how things worked, sitting near rockets, and somehow getting pulled into an adventure bigger than themselves. That movie hit me right in the imagination. It made me think, “Maybe this isn’t completely impossible. Maybe a kid really could get close to space.”
From there, I wanted anything and everything connected to rockets, astronauts, machines, and the universe. I watched Space Shuttle launches whenever I could, the countdowns, the clouds of smoke, the engines shaking the ground, and that incredible moment when the shuttle slowly lifted away from Earth. Even through a TV screen, it felt sacred, like humanity was doing something brave and almost unreal.
I was also the kind of kid who could disappear into books for hours, especially ones that showed how things were built. Incredible Cross-Sections was pure magic to me. Seeing the inside of ships, machines, buildings, and vehicles scratched the same itch that space did. It made the impossible feel understandable. And The Way Things Work fed that curiosity even more. I didn’t just want to look at rockets and spacecraft; I wanted to know what was inside them, how they moved, how they launched, and how all the hidden pieces came together.
That was the world that hooked me: Star Wars giving me the wonder, SpaceCamp giving me the dream, shuttle launches giving me the awe, and those books giving me the need to understand how everything worked. Add in Bill Nye, Carl Sagan’s COSMOS, classroom space posters, model rockets, planet books, VHS tapes, late-night documentaries, and every image of astronauts or galaxies I could find, and I didn’t stand a chance.
Space became more than something I thought was cool. It became a permanent part of how I saw the world, a mix of adventure, curiosity, engineering, imagination, and wonder. It made me look up more. It made me ask how things worked. And it made the universe feel like the biggest story there is.