Jim Dutton

Last week, fresh off the fourth-to-last Shuttle mission, STS-131, NASA astronaut Jim Dutton came to speak at OMSI, my local science museum. When I got the email about this event, I RSVPed immediately -- after all, an astronaut in my town? How urbane. Surely the intelligentsia of Oregon would come in droves to discuss the boggling phenomenological experience of spaceflight and the uncertain future of NASA with one of our nation's "right stuff." As usual, I was wrong; the only adult in the museum unaccompanied by a least one small child, I felt somehow like a pervert, as though the harried…