Michael Blouin says he’s been interested in space since he watched the first moon landing as a kid, and now one of his books is going to the same place.
Blouin, a Kemptville-based author, is having his 2019 novel Skin House brought along for an upcoming NASA launch.
“Sometimes,” he says, “I just have trouble getting my head around it, believing that it’s actually happening.”
The launch is happening as part of a project called “Writers on the Moon,” sending an SD card containing work from various independent authors into space.
Blouin says he nearly missed his opportunity to be a part of the initiative due to a personal tragedy.
“Our house right here in Kemptville, it hadn’t burned to the ground, but it had a serious fire,” he explains, “which we escaped and the dogs escaped and everyone was fine, but virtually everything we owned on the planet went in the fire.”
Blouin and his family were displaced for a year and a half after the fire, and he says he missed the deadline to apply for the program because of it.
“I was just crushed by that,” he adds. “Shortly after that, I got a call from a friend of mine in Newfoundland, Carolyn R. Parsons, a great writer, who had not missed the deadline, and she said, ‘hey Mike, would you like to be involved?’ So, I got involved in that mission, really, unofficially, as a stowaway.”
The launch for the Writers on the Moon mission is scheduled for February 25th, in Cape Canaveral, Florida, but Blouin says there’s a chance it’ll be postponed.
“People probably know how these launches are. A technical thing could delay them, or weather could delay them, but I’m going to give myself a window, and hopefully I’ll actually be there on the day that it goes, and if it gets delayed, then I’ll go when it goes.”
Blouin is also slated to have another one of his books featured in a follow-up mission, a collaboration between NASA and SpaceX, in 2024.