Spam comments – which get caught by a filter and dumped into a bucket for periodic review and emptying – come and go in waves. Lots of spam from Russian/Eastern Yurpeen websites. And right now, there’s a big messy wave of ’em slopping in. I glanced at the bucket and noticed one message that didn’t seem to be spam, but otherwise just deleted the whole thing. So if you post a comment and it doesn’t appear… it might’ve been snagged by the spam filter.
The future of American manned spaceflight as NASA saw it, from the vantage point of 1970. An “integrated program” was foreseen, with no major funding cuts or changes based on politics. While the timeline is not calibrated… the Mars landing was expected to occur in 1986.
Good times.
The “Viking” and “Grand Tour” missions at least took place, though the designs were slightly different from what’s depicted here. The “nuclear shuttle was meant to haul cargo from low Earth orbit to geosynchronous in order to lower cost.
I’ve finally got the rudiments of the *other* website roughed out. Currently, 29 of my panoramic photos are available in 12X36, printed on high-quality heavy bond photo paper. Get ’em while the gettings good!
A lot of the descriptive verbage is yet to be scribbled, but you can see all the panoramas and, most importantly, order them.
The Smithsonian seems to have gotten it’s mitts on some spy satellites. Just unveiled at Udvar-Hazy, and shown photographically here:
KH-7 GAMBIT-1 / KH-8 GAMBIT-3 / KH-9 HEXAGON
Neat stuff.
A nearly blind albino/redheaded baby seal abandoned by it’s family gets photographed, then picked up and taken to a dolphinarium to be raised and cared for.
It’s tough being ginger even when you’re a seal: Lonely pup shunned by his colony
While this baby seal would probably be more than happy to rip your face off (certainly so once it’s an adult), you can’t look at the photos and not go “awww.”
Clint Eastwood: ‘I don’t give a f*ck’ if gays marry
Where we read one of the wisest philosophies ever:
“Because what I really believe is, let’s spend a little more time leaving everybody alone.”
Damned straight. It doesn’t matter if you are personally offended or icked out by someone elses behavior, whether it’s surfing naked, collecting guns, listening to rap music, reading Marx, eating bacon (mmm, bacon), tatooing Hello Kitty on their nads, reading the Koran or making a fabulous beast with two backs… if they ain’t breaking your leg or picking your pocket or rolling around on your property while doing their ickworthy deeds… then you are not being injured and have no cause to prevent them from doing what makes ’em happy.
At the same time, if what you’re doing, how you’re dressed or what you believe sets you outside the mainstream and/or you know that it icks people out… shut your yap about “tolerance.” If you aren’t hurting others or their property, they have no right to stop you. At the same time, you have no right to determine what *their* opinions should be. You have no right to be “accepted.”
*Real* diversity will be in force when society is full of people who, when asked about their neighbor, say: “Him? He’s a disgusting freak who believes stupid things and dresses all wrong, and we get along just fine.” “Diversity” as it’s foisted upon us these days is just a mutant alternate term for “making sure nobody judges anything negatively.”
A concept from 1957 for a manned space capsule based on the as-yet unflown “Discoverer” capsule shape. The basic geometry has proven itself over the years.
Not that I went looking, of course. I’m just *assuming* that they are kinda blurry, poorly lit, grainy and SPECTACULAR.
On September 8, 2011, ATK fired the last of the Shuttle-scale solid rocket boosters at their Promontory, Utah, test site. The Development Motor-3 test fired a five-segment booster generating 3.6 million pounds of thrust. I was in the public viewing area at the time with three cameras going. I have put together a photo book with the best of my photos of that test, and am making it available in two forms:
1) Printed by Magcloud, for only $7.99
2) Printed by Magcloud AND with a digital (PDF) copy, for only $9.49
They can be previewed and purchased here:
http://scottlowther.magcloud.com/
