Celebrating real astronauts

This week, I prefer to honor true astronauts like Gus Grissom who, 60 years ago this week, almost drowned when his Mercury capsule landed in the Atlantic Ocean and water flooded in through the hatch (story here). A veteran of a hundred missions in the Korean War (having joined the Air Force late in the WWII and serving stateside), Grissom amassed thousands of hours flying experience and years of astronaut training, eventually returning to space as command pilot for Gemini 3. He would later die in the horrific 1967 Apollo 1 (as it was later called) accident. Please media, when you refer to heroes and astronauts, reserve those terms for men and woman like Lieutenant Colonel Grissom rather than self-serving, thrill-seeking billionaires who buy their aeronautical fame rather than earn it.