"[Future NASA astronaut Donald Pettit] filled up his garage after driving through a blizzard one night to an auction of surplus gear at the lab [Los Alamos National Laboratory] and finding himself alone in the seats. He bought everything he could stuff into his junky pickup, jury-rigged the power in his house to accept three-phase tools, and learned how to make liquid oxygen from scratch. NASA brought him onboard in 1996, not long after he'd turned forty-one but before he managed to blow himself up and cast a good chunk of the southwest into darkness.
"He [was later] tapped by his fellow astronauts to be the first man on Mars. The smart money began moving his way during his first weeks of astronaut training, when he raised his hand during a lecture on rocket propellants -- namely, the liquid oxygen that was waiting to go off in his garage. 'Do you know what color liquid oxygen is?' he asked the lecturer.
"'Well, no,' he replied. 'I've never actually seen it. I'm not
sure anyone has.'
"'It's blue,' Pettit said from his seat at the back of the class. The rest of the students turned around to look at him. He looked back at them. 'I just thought you'd be interested to know,' he said."
[Aboard the International Space Station, Donald Pettit squeezed spherical globules of coffee from his straw and "drank" them with chopsticks.]
Sources
Esquire, July 2004, p. 80
