Raff Family History
Raff in Space?
Stardust Microchip 1999-2006
Mars Rover 2003?

At this time I am not aware of any Raffs who have been able to venture beyond the confines of our planet earth. As the family tree grows and man continues his quest to the stars, perhaps I will be able to showcase a Raff astronaut or cosmonaut in the near future. I'm sure there is a budding Neal Armstrong Raff or a Yuri Gregoran Raff out there somewhere.

Stardust

Although no person named Raff has ventured into space, the RAFF name was launched into space on February 7, 1999 as part of NASA project Stardust. The STARDUST spacecraft is on its way to an encounter with Comet Wild-2 in 2004, and will return comet samples back to Earth in 2006. As part of a public outreach effort NASA etched over 1 million names onto microchips placed on the spacecraft. Actually 2 copies of each chip are on board the spacecraft. 1 copy of each will return to earth in 2004 along with samples collected from the comet. The other copy will remain in space forever. The following names are on the stardust chips:

Chip 1	Chip 2
RODERICK R. RAFF JR	JOSEPH R RAFF III
RODERICK R. RAFF SR	RAFF
DAELIN JAMES RAFF	AARON J RAFF
DAVID A. RAFF	ANDREW J RAFF
HANNAH ELAINE RAFF	CRYSTAL R RAFF
LUWANNA D. RAFF	JO A RAFF

If, like me you missed this opportunity you have another chance.

The name Carl T. Raff was to be launched in April 2001 for a landing on Mars, but the Mars Landing Mission has been postponed. Hopefully sometime around 2003 the Raff name will land on the Red Planet.

You can add your name to the CDROM and show your support of our space program by signing up at http://spacekids.hq.nasa.gov/2003/, You'll be able to print a nice certificate like this Carl T. Raff - Certificate No. (1481384) from the NASA site. You can even save it locally as HTML case NASA removes it.