A goal of the National Space Society and its Huntsville Alabama L5 (HAL5) chapter is to perform space related community and educational outreach, further the careers of students interested in space, and inspire future space leaders. The Society for Technical Communication-Huntsville/North Alabama (STC-NA) endeavors to advance technical communication. These goals were well represented when the organizations worked with Dr. Ryan Weber of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and author, longstanding HAL5 member, and past Policy Formulation Subcommittee chair of NSS David Hitt, who delivered an online space-author panel discussion The Write Stuff: The Authors Who Chronicle Humanity’s Outward Odyssey to the space community on September 15, 2020. The Ordway Awardwinning Outward Odyssey: A People’s History of Spaceflight series is published by the University of Nebraska Press (UNP). The authors for this series prioritize the human stories of space with an emphasis on technology and an international perspective.
Meeting coordinator and STC-NA President Heather McCain opened the proceedings and author Hitt introduced each author panelist: series editor Colin Burgess, author of Shattered Dreams, Fallen Astronauts, In the Shadow of the Moon, Into That Silent Sea, and editor of Footprints in the Dust; Michelle Evans, author of The X-15 Rocket Plane; Francis French, coauthor (with Burgess) of In the Shadow of the Moon and Into That Silent Sea and editor of Apollo Pilot; Jay Gallentine, author of Infinity Beckoned and Ambassadors from Earth; Hitt, co-author of Bold They Rise and Homesteading Space; and John Youskauskas, coauthor of Come Fly With Us: NASA’s Payload Specialist Program.
The familiarity and friendship shared between Hitt and the author panelists created a pleasant environment for the panel discussion. Hitt’s questions ranged from “Who are you when you are not being an author?” to “What is the secret to writing a book?” Answering the first question, Burgess said that he combined his interest in space flight history and short-story writing for the Outward Odyssey series. As a child, Evans noted that her father, who worked in the space program, took her with him to work and that she lived near the X-15 program’s base in Southern California. Professionally, Evans was in the Air Force and then in the aerospace industry as an engineer, but her first love was to write about the X-15. French noted, “I don’t really remember a time when I wasn’t into all of this stuff. The human stories have always been more fascinating than the technical stories to me.” Gallentine developed into a writer from a background in broadcast, movies, film production and editing. Hitt had dreamed of becoming an aerospace engineer but found that he preferred writing about space as a journalist. As a child, Youskauskas went to space museums and saw spacecraft, which inspired him to become involved in aviation and spaceflight history.