The Moon

The only male member of an NHS health visitor team has won a sex discrimination case after his female boss told him to 'man up' in front of a room full of women.

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The new space race has the potential to shape the global balance of power. Satellites enable the navigation of drones and missiles and generate imagery used for intelligence, and they are mostly under the control of private companies . . . Several officials told me that they were alarmed by NASA’s reliance on SpaceX for essential services. “There is only one thing worse than a government monopoly. And that is a private monopoly that the government is dependent on,” Bridenstine said. “I do worry that we have put all of our eggs into one basket, and it’s the SpaceX basket.”--Farrow

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Prigozin's murder must make people think something. 

Putin is not a leader as much as an independent, self-advancing strongman whose loyalty is to himself. The other world leaders will wax moralistically but will do nothing; they want to protect themselves. This should raise the horrible question, Are these people doing anything for their citizens? Or, is everything the citizen gets deciduous, shed from above as part of the 'leader's' lifecycle?

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The debates are never as revealing or as valuable as hoped for but last night's diverse gladiators made it entertaining.

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The Moon

The moon is getting busy

India has landed a vehicle on the moon, close to the currently important south pole. There have been 28 landing missions--vs. 'impact' landings where the vehicle is destroyed--including six American missions that carried humans along with it. A total of twelve men have walked on the moon. All from the Apollo Program. And those men all returned.

The Luna-25 lander, Russia’s first space launch to the moon’s surface since the 1970s, entered lunar orbit last Wednesday and was supposed to land as early as Monday. At 2:10 p.m. on Saturday afternoon Moscow time, according to Roscosmos, the state corporation that oversees Russian space activities, the spacecraft fired its engine to enter an orbit that would set it up for a lunar landing. But an unexplained “emergency situation” occurred.

On Sunday, Roscosmos said that it had lost contact with the spacecraft 47 minutes after the start of the engine firing. Attempts to re-establish communications failed, and Luna-25 had deviated from its planned orbit and “ceased its existence as a result of a collision with the lunar surface,” Roscosmos said.