Jack Hitt

Originally answered the question, outside my window I can see stars and that is all.

Where I know the moon will be, there is simply a black void.

The moon's presence is defined solely by the absence of the stars.

I am alone now.

Truly alone.

And absolutely isolated from any known life.

I am it.

If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon.

And one plus God knows what on this side.

Absolutely.

Lowe's description of the sky and the sensation of being out there, you know, three and a half, four miles above the earth seems so very close to what Mike Collins is describing, you know, hundreds of thousands of miles above the earth.

It seems like specifically a very American obsession to try to push their way to the outer edge of something.

That whole frontier mentality that has kind of been with us from the beginning.

The way Ben tells the story, it all began where so many great ideas originate, reading in the bathroom.

It was a book about gambling, and there was a three-page chapter on blackjack explaining how to count cards, and Ben thought, I could do this.

He waited tables back then, minimum wage work, and he had just had his first kid.

He and his wife were broke, and so one day he came up with a plan to take their last $800 to a dinky casino outside of Seattle.

And he won.

Ben formed a small crew of card counters to hit the casinos together.

And they did okay for a while.