Weather began moving in a couple nights back, which added some variety to the night sky. As always, 1/10 scale panoramas from Thatcher, Utah.
Looking west:
Looking south, with the lights from Salt Lake City at center (behind Little Mountain) and Ogden at left.
All data about the announcement embargoed until 1 PM Eastern on Wednesday. The only hint:
CNET said that it had seen the research in an article published Monday, adding that “while we can’t share details yet, let’s just say it could very easily provide us with new settings for many future works of science fiction.”
Let’s just hope it’s better than some other recent NASA announcements that turned out to be busts… arsenic life forms, anyone?
Here are two more images to haunt your dreams and harrow, yes, your very soul. Two ads from the early 70’s that demonstrate not only tragic notions of what makes good mens fashions, but also incomprehensible notions of how to sell said fashions. I’m guessing that this was a result of the fetish for “machismo” that filled the 70’s… not so much actual masculinity as a theatrical parody of it.
Pictures after the break to protect fragile minds.
So, John Glenn was Americas first astronaut into orbit. For a time he was Hero Number One, and apparently considered so important for PR that he was essentially blackballed from going back into space for fear that were he to die it would’ve trashed national morale. The end result was that he didn’t get to fly into space again until he was an old man.
But consider another course of events. He flies to orbit, comes back a hero… and stays a flying astronaut. In that case, chances are good he would’ve gone up on Gemini and an Apollo (not necessarily the first lunar lander, but one of ’em).
My question to ponder: let’s say on his first mission to the moon – call it “Apollo 4,” because “Apollo 1” didn’t burn up on the pad Because Reasons – something goes wrong and the crew is lost. America’s Greatest Hero dies in the course of the mission, out in deep space.
OK, we can all agree that this would be a bad thing on a human level. But from a *political* point of view… would losing the Great Hero and two Red Shirts out in space, rather than a trio of Red Shirts, have *necessarily* trashed the space program? When Challenger was lost, the crew were, as far as the public was concerned, a bunch of folks nobody knew (and one supercargo teacher that a lot of folks knew). Certainly not mid-60’s John Glenn level of celebrity. But even so, they all became national heroes instantly, and their memory helped to keep the Shuttle program going. So it seems to me that losing a national hero on the level of Glenn would *not* be an inevitable death knell to the program, but perhaps a *spur* to the program.
Thought?
I’m tellin’ ya… SpaceX could make some extra scratch by duct taping some lawn chairs to the outside of the top of Stage One and selling those seats to paying customers (space suit rental extra).
Here’s a shocker:
In short, the restaurant has a strict “no show/no call” policy, which means if you don’t show up for work and you don’t call in to give them some sort of explanation and chance to bring in a replacement, then they fire you. And this is not an unreasonable policy for a place that can be thrown into chaos if someone just plain doesn’t show up. And these twelve employees apparently didn’t bother to call in. So… there it is.
Now, if you perhaps feel some sort of sympathy for these poor workers, consider this:
“They feel like they’ve been unfairly terminated,” said a friend, translating for the employees.
Errrrmmmm….
“(They’ve) been working there for almost two years since the restaurant opened,” said the friend.
Two years these folks have been there, and they need someone to translate simple statements into simple English. It was perhaps unwise to hire them in the first place. It’s never good to reply on people who don’t understand the language.
Omar Abdel-Rahman has died at the excessive age of 78 due to complications from diabetes.
There are those who say that no matter how horrible the actions of a person or persons, they take no joy in those people’s deaths. To these presumed moral superiors I say:
You try to kill a bunch of folks because you got some crazy ideas from a crazy book written millenia ago by some crazy semi-literate monster who headed a death cult? Yeah… we don’t need you.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 is due to launch a space station respply Dragon from launch pad 39A with a land-landing of the booster. Watch it live:
Ugh. I feel several points dumber for having watched this. I shudder to imagine how idiotic I’d feel if I paid money to see the full thing.
It is pretty sad that so much time, effort and resources are expended on patently false nonsense. More than a century after the facts become universally available that shoot down the pillars of the argument here, people still trot this rubbish out. Sigh. But then, centuries after communism was shown to be disastrous, people still trot it out. Millenia after the Earth was shown to be spherical, flat Earthers still exist. Astrology. Ghost hunters. Dowsers. It seems that being objectively, provably false just makes some ideas immortal.
Especially sad that it is readily shot down, line by line:
First night I took astrophotos I tried to see what I could get of the Pleiades. Sadly, they don’t come through all that well compared to telescopic photos, but at least you can see ’em. On first glance I could see a satellite pass reasonably close to them – not as close as the Orion satellite, not really worthy of note. But on closer review, you can make out a second satellite trail… much shorter streaks, much fainter, much less uniform in brightness, sometimes not visible at all. This indicates something at a higher orbit and probably tumbling. I expect it’s less “satellite” than “piece of debris,” but who knows. This particular trail *did* pass through the Pleiades, but I didn’t catch that, my first photo being several seconds after the passage.
The second satellite is just barely visible shooting out of the right of the Pleiades. It seemed that the best way to display this so it was visible was with an animated GIF. Since it turns out to be a 2 megabyte image file, I’ve put it past a “read more” break so it doesn’t clog up the blog. The animation is a bit clunky since the series of photos was a bit stuttered.
