I was born in 1963 in Heilbronn in southwest Germany, grew up in Loerrach in the most southwestern edge of Germany, and, since 1984, have lived in Karlsruhe, a city near the Rhine some fifty kilometers south of Heidelberg.
I spent some years at the Technical University - not finishing my studies in computer science - while already working as a software developer, which is still the way I earn a living. I've two children, Ami and Lukas. My children's interest in space exploration began with watching Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out over and over again.
Although Ami's interest shifted to other things, Lukas learned to handle the VCR by repeatedly watching the launch scene in the Apollo 13 movie and is now a consumer of SpacecraftFilms DVDs.
I have been interested space from the beginning. I don't remember anything about the first moon landing, but I do have memories of the last two or three. Live TV coverages of the EVAs were often late at night, so I missed a lot of them.
Because of my age, my interest in space exploration has been more focused on the unmanned Pioneer, Mariner, Viking and Voyager missions to the planets. The Galileo mission to Jupiter was the first I could track on the Internet, first by just ftp-ing status reports, later on the WWW.
The WWW made tons and tons of raw and processed material available, especially in the area of space exploration. Of the latter, the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal is one of the finest I've stumbled over and I'm glad that I could help on it a very little bit.
Here is the sound of Kucharek.
November 2005