It was more that the whole family was part of the culture of space exploration. Like, we watched the moon landing together (I barely remember it, but I remember it!) and when the first Space Shuttle took off, we went to Goddard's auditorium and watched it with other NASA families on a big screen. If my class was doing a field trip I didn't want to go on, or if school was canceled and I didn't want to stay home, I'd go in with him and he'd set me up with one of the first small computers - this was in the early 1970s, it was maybe the size of a large microwave (now), with a single LED line display (like a calculator) and a paper that printed out as it went. I learned BASIC on that machine with a tutorial program! I was able to get a summer job with a NASA contractor while I was in high school, and it just jump-started my whole life in science.

He was a research scientist in Goddard's Laboratory for Extraterrestrial Physics, so I gleefully told my friends that my dad was an extraterrestrial physicist! His actual field of research was planetary magnetospheres, and he was very famous in his field...of about a dozen people. Now at age 86 he is still, amazingly, active in a network of scientists and science teachers, mostly talking about how to preserve the history of science, and how to teach it to young people, and encourage them to become scientists.