Revenant

Apparently, there was a pro-Trump chant that arose at the Steeler game last night but I did not see it broadcast.

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Can you imagine the people behind the Harris campaign--or Trump's--monitoring speech in the public square?

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Universities hoping to reclaim trust must do more than simply make political activism evenhanded. They must reclaim the pursuit of truth that alone justifies university education.


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A US startup company is offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ using controversial technology that raises questions about the ethics of genetic enhancement.

The company, Heliospect Genomics, has worked with more than a dozen couples undergoing IVF, according to undercover video footage. The recordings show the company marketing its services at up to $50,000 (£38,000) for clients seeking to test 100 embryos, and claiming to have helped some parents select future children based on genetic predictions of intelligence. Managers boasted their methods could produce a gain of more than six IQ points.

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Revenant

(This got lost in the wash last week but here it is.)

A rescue. A reprieve. In our daily human slog, a real human achievement.

I'm sure everyone has seen this but it is still just amazing.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1845542074609004971

SpaceX's Starship rocket achieved a world first on Sunday during its fifth test flight, showing for the first time that the launch system may really have what it takes to change spaceflight.

The launch system includes a Starship rocket ship stacked atop a 233-foot-tall Super Heavy booster and stands taller than the Statue of Liberty.

The Super Heavy booster released Starship on its path toward space, then began to fall back to Earth. For the first time ever, as the booster descended toward the company's Texas launchpad, a pair of giant mechanical "chopsticks," or arms, snatched it.

The giant booster had returned to Earth in one piece. It was SpaceX's first attempt at the revolutionary chopstick maneuver.

This engineering feat is unlike anything ever seen in orbital-rocket technology.  

The feat brings SpaceX one step closer to Musk's goals of building the first fully reusable rocket system, slashing the cost of spaceflight, and, ultimately, making humanity a multiplanetary species.

Exploring the Unknown

Let me see. So Hamas created a cease-fire discussion with the U.S. without Israeli participation and then agreed to the terms they created. Israel was sandbagged and when they couldn't agree they were vilified in the press. A great Hamas coup.
Then the U.S. withheld their weapons shipment because Israel wouldn't agree to the unilateral Hamas proposal.
Has the U.S. been out-maneuvered by Hamas terrorists?

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Why did the judge allow Stormy Daniels to appear in court when her testimony had nothing to do with the accusation?

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Exploring the Unknown

In 2018, scientists discovered something unexpected living aboard the International Space Station. This surprise visitor turned out to be five strains of a multi-drug-resistant bacteria known to as Enterobacter bugandensis. Now, researchers say at least 13 strains have been discovered. This means that the original strains have mutated into several new strains of bacteria never seen before on Earth.

This bacteria is an opportunistic pathogen, which means on Earth it will only cause disease in a person if they are already battling a disease or have a weakened immune system. But that doesn't mean that this new organism, unseen before--ever, will be a similar organism to the one we know.

So we are launching structures into space and seeing the development of unique organisms with unknown activity and potential. So far, so good?

Did any of these guys read The Andromeda Strain?

The Moon

The Moon

This is a big year for lunar science flight.

Two private companies are working to get the U.S. back in lunar landings, more than five decades after the Apollo program ended.
It’s part of a NASA-supported effort to kick-start commercial moon deliveries, as the space agency focuses on getting astronauts back there.

“They’re scouts going to the moon ahead of us,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

Pittsburgh’s Astrobotic Technology is up first with a planned liftoff of a lander Monday aboard a brand new rocket, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan. Houston’s Intuitive Machines aims to launch a lander in mid-February, hopping a flight with SpaceX.

Japan will attempt to land in two weeks. The Japanese Space Agency’s lander with two toy-size rovers had a big head start, sharing a September launch with an X-ray telescope that stayed behind in orbit around Earth.

If successful, Japan will become the fifth country to pull off a lunar landing. Russia and the U.S. did it repeatedly in the 1960s and 70s. China has landed three times in the past decade — including on the moon’s far side — and is returning to the far side later this year to bring back lunar samples. And just last summer, India did it. Only the U.S. has put astronauts on the moon.

Landing safely is no easy feat. There’s hardly any atmosphere to slow spacecraft, and parachutes obviously won’t work. That means a lander must descend using thrusters, while navigating past treacherous cliffs and craters.

A Japanese millionaire’s company, ispace, saw its lander smash into the moon last April, followed by Russia’s crash landing in August. India was successful a few days later near the south polar region; it was the country’s second try after crashing in 2019. An Israeli nonprofit also slammed into the moon in 2019.

The United States has not attempted a moon landing since Apollo 17’s Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, the last of 12 moonwalkers, explored the gray, dusty surface in December 1972. But Mars beckoned and the moon receded in NASA’s rearview mirror, as the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union came to a close. The U.S. followed with a handful or two of lunar satellites, but no controlled landers — until now.

Not only are Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines looking to end America’s moon-landing drought, but they’re also vying to be the first private entity to land — gently — on the moon.

Despite its later start, Intuitive Machines has a faster, more direct shot and should land within a week of liftoff. It will take Astrobotic two weeks just to get to the moon and another month in lunar orbit, before a landing is attempted on Feb. 23.

If there are rocket delays, which already have stalled both missions, either company could wind up there first. “It’s going to be a wild, wild ride,” promised Astrobotic’s chief executive John Thornton.

His counterpart at Intuitive Machines, Steve Altemus, said the space race is “more about the geopolitics, where China is going, where the rest of the world’s going.” That said, “We sure would like to be first.”

The two companies have been nose to nose since receiving nearly $80 million each in 2019 under a NASA program to develop lunar delivery services. Fourteen companies are now under contract by NASA.

Astrobotic’s four-legged, 6-foot-tall (1.9-meter-tall) lander, named Peregrine after the fastest bird, a falcon, will carry 20 research packages to the moon for seven countries, including five for NASA and a shoebox-sized rover for Carnegie Mellon University. Peregrine will aim for the mid-latitudes’ Sinus Viscositatis, or Bay of Stickiness, named after the long-ago silica magma that formed the nearby Gruithuisen Domes.

Intuitive Machines’ six-legged, 14-foot-tall (4-meter-tall) lander, Nova-C, will target the moon’s south polar region, also carrying five experiments for NASA that will last about two weeks. The company is targeting 80 degrees south latitude for touchdown. That would be well within Antarctica on Earth, Altemus noted, and 10 degrees closer to the pole than India landed last summer. Scientists believe the south pole’s permanently shadowed craters hold billions of pounds (kilograms) of frozen water that could be used for drinking and making rocket fuel. That’s why the first moonwalkers in NASA’s Artemis program — named after Apollo’s twin sister in Greek mythology — will land there. NASA still has 2025 on the books for that launch, but the General Accountability Office suspects it will be closer to 2027.

Astrobotic will head to the south pole on its second flight, carrying NASA’s water-seeking Viper rover. And Intuitive Machines will return there on its second mission, delivering an ice drill for NASA.

Landing near the moon’s south pole is particularly dicey.

“It’s so rocky and craggy and full of craters at the south pole and mountainous, that it’s very difficult to find a lighted region to touch down safely,” Altemus said. “So you’ve got to be able to finesse that and just set it down right in the right spot.”

While Houston has long been associated with space, Pittsburgh is a newcomer. To commemorate the Steel City, Astrobotic’s lander will carry a Kennywood amusement park token, the winner of a public vote that beat out the Steelers’ Terrible Towel waved at football games, dirt from Moon Township’s Moon Park, and a Heinz pickle pin.

The lander is also carrying the ashes or DNA from 70 people, including “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Another 265 people will be represented on the rocket’s upper stage, which will circle the sun once separated from the lander. They include three original “Star Trek” cast members, as well as strands of hair from three U.S. presidents: George Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy. (culled from an informative AP article)

I was at Canaveral with its islands of aerospace outposts, SpaceX and Blue Origin, poking up toward the sky. The space machines are astounding; one can only be optimistic. And awed. Except for one thing. There is an atmosphere at this overwhelming scientific hideaway of another purpose, a fellow traveler on the rockets. In addition to the astounding astro-science engineering, there is the whiff of social engineering. Every encounter, every presentation, mentions the contribution of women to the program. And this is supported by the self-conscious name of the program: Artemis, the twin sister of Apollo. the feminine reflection of the earlier Apollo program.

Hopefully, this is just symbolic, benign and silly, like a Heinz pickle pin.

Space Flight Update

The international group to control global warming, COP28, is being hosted by a country, The United Arab Emirates, that is ramping up its production of oil. The man presiding over the event, Sultan Al Jaber, happens to be the head of Adnoc, the state-owned company that supplies 3 percent of the world’s oil. He also runs the much smaller state-owned renewables company, Masdar.

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Widely accepted wisdom has it that electric vehicles are easier to maintain than those with internal combustion powertrains. It seems intuitive—EVs have many fewer moving parts than cars that have to detonate small quantities of hydrocarbon fuel thousands of times a minute. However, according to data collected by Consumer Reports, EVs are significantly less reliable than conventionally powered cars.

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It's just a joke--unless it's true.

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Space Flight Update

The United States will try once again to land a craft on the Moon on January 25. The lander, named Peregrine, will have no one on board. It was developed by the American company Astrobotic, and will carry NASA instruments to study the lunar environment in anticipation of NASA's Artemis manned missions. NASA has commissioned US companies to send scientific experiments and technologies to the Moon -- a program called CLPS. It is hoped these fixed-price contracts will make it possible to develop a lunar economy and provide transport services at a lower cost.

Takeoff is scheduled for December 24 from Florida aboard the inaugural flight of the new rocket from the ULA industrial group, named Vulcan Centaur. The probe will then take "a few days" to reach lunar orbit, but will have to wait until January 25 before attempting landing, so that light conditions at the target location are right. The descent will be carried out autonomously, without human intervention.

Only about half of the missions that have gone to the surface of the Moon have been successful, In the spring, the Japanese start-up ispace had already attempted to become the first private company to land on the Moon, but the mission ended in a crash. Israel also suffered a setback in 2019. Only four countries have successfully landed on the Moon: the United States, Russia, China and, most recently, India.

In addition to Astrobotic, NASA has signed contracts with other companies, such as Firefly Aerospace, Draper, and Intuitive Machines.

Intuitive Machines is due to take off aboard a SpaceX rocket in January.

Asteroids

When Audrey Jean Knauer, a woman from Kentucky, died in 1997, she shocked her family by leaving over $300,000 to actor Charles Bronson. Knauer had never actually met Bronson and was merely a huge fan of his work.

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In the 1960s, the Beatles attempted to obtain the film rights to The Lord of the Rings. The band reportedly wanted Stanley Kubrick to direct the movie, and planned on John Lennon playing Gollum, while Paul McCartney hoped to play Frodo. Their plans never came to fruition because J.R.R. Tolkien refused to give the band the rights to adapt his novel.

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The current disorder in America might seem encouraging to its enemies. But one could worry that a canny politician in the U.S. might be happy to be challenged by an international opponent with the hopes the challenge could be used to rally and unify the country. Dangerous times.

Asteroids

In September of 2022 NASA smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid. A new set of five papers in Nature has now demonstrated that not only did NASA hit its target, but the mission was also a success in diverting the asteroid:

DART, a spacecraft the size of a golf cart, collided with a Great Pyramid-sized asteroid called Dimorphos. The impact caused the asteroid’s orbit around another space rock to shrink — Dimorphos now completes an orbit 33 minutes faster than before the impact, researchers report in Nature.

…As DART hurtled towards Dimorphos at more than 6 kilometers per second, the first part that hit was one of its solar panels, which smashed into a 6.5-meter-wide boulder. Microseconds later, the main body of the spacecraft collided with the rocky surface next to the boulder — and the US$330-million DART shattered to bits….the spacecraft hit a spot around 25 meters from the asteroid’s center, maximizing the force of its impact….large amounts of the asteroid’s rubble flew outwards from the impact. The recoil from this force pushed the asteroid further off its previous trajectory. Researchers estimate that this spray of rubble meant Dimorphos’ added momentum was almost four times that imparted by DART.

…Although NASA has demonstrated this technique on only one asteroid, the results could be broadly applicable to future hazards…if a dangerous asteroid were ever detected heading for Earth, a mission to smash into it would probably be able to divert it away from the planet.

Artemis 1

One of the great ironies of climate change activism today is that many of the movement’s most vocal proponents are also horrified by global income inequality. They are blind, however, to the fact that the costs of the policies they demand will be borne disproportionately by the world’s poorest. This is because so much of climate change policy boils down to limiting access to cheap energy.--Lomborg

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Nucleic Acid Testing Now Accounts for 1.3% of China’s GDP.

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"Musicaster" is a mediocre musician. The pejorative suffix -aster (meaning something that is inferior, small, or shallow) gives us some delightful words when it comes to name-calling. A reviewer brands a poet a poetaster (an inferior poet) and the poet might call the reviewer a criticaster. There are also the terms mathematicaster and philosophaster.

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The United States secretly shipped out of Iraq more than 500 tons of low-grade uranium dating back to the Saddam Hussein era, the Pentagon said Monday. (CNN 2003) Huh? Where was that from?

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Artemis 1

Artemis SLS rocket and Orion capsule are up for Artemis I's month-long test flight. At the end, the pearly white Orion capsule will travel a total of 1.3 million miles, circling the moon for a week, and returning to Earth.

Artemis I is the precursor to Artemis II, a crewed mission around the moon, and then Artemis III, the first to return humans to the surface. Artemis I is designed to be the only uncrewed test flight of the SLS, which places a lot of pressure on it to deliver big.

The follow-up mission, Artemis II, will feature three NASA astronauts and one astronaut from the Canadian Space Agency. The fate of that mission rests on the coming weeks and Artemis I. At present, it's scheduled to launch in May 2024.

That will be followed by Artemis III, which is the "Apollo 11" of the Artemis program. Artemis III will endeavor to land humans on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years, sometime in 2025. It will feature the first female astronaut to leave a boot print in lunar soil.

Lessons From Space

                                                           

                             Lessons From Space

How do you survive in space? It turns out that mental models are really useful. In his book An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, Chris Hadfield gives an in-depth look into the learning and knowledge required for a successful space mission. Hadfield was, among other roles with NASA, the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station. He doesn’t call out mental models specifically, but the thinking he describes demonstrates a ton of them, from circle of competence to margin of safety. His lessons are both counter-intuitive and useful far beyond space missions. Here are some of them assembled by Farnam St.: 

“An astronaut is someone who’s able to make good decisions quickly, with incomplete information, when the consequences really matter. I didn’t miraculously become one either, after just eight days in space. But I did get in touch with the fact that I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.” (circle of competence) 

“Over time, I learned how to anticipate problems in order to prevent them, and how to respond effectively in critical situations.” (second-order thinking) 

“Success is feeling good about the work you do throughout the long, unheralded journey that may or may not wind up at the launch pad. You can’t view training solely as a stepping stone to something loftier. It’s got to be an end in itself.” (velocity) 

“A lot of our training is like this: we learn how to do things that contribute in a very small way to a much larger mission but do absolutely nothing for our own career prospects.” (cooperation) 

“If you’re not sure what to be alarmed about, everything is alarming.” (probabilistic thinking) 

“Truly being ready means understanding what could go wrong – and having a plan to deal with it.” (margin of safety) 

“A sim [simulation] is an opportunity to practice but frequently it’s also a wake-up call: we really don’t know exactly what we’re doing and we’d better figure it out before we’re facing this situation in space.” (back-up systems) 

“In any field, it’s a plus if you view criticism as potentially helpful advice rather than as a personal attack.” (inversion)

“At NASA, we’re not just expected to respond positively to criticism, but to go one step further and draw attention to our own missteps and miscalculations. It’s not easy for hyper-competitive people to talk openly about screw-ups that make them look foolish or incompetent. Management has to create a climate where owning up to mistakes is permissible and colleagues have to agree, collectively, to cut each other some slack.” (friction and viscosity) 

“If you’re only thinking about yourself, you can’t see the whole picture.” (relativity) 

“Over the years I’ve learned that investing in other people’s success doesn’t just make them more likely to enjoy working with me. It also improves my own chances of survival and success.” (reciprocity) 

“It’s obvious that you have to plan for a major life event like a launch. You can’t just wing it. What’s less obvious, perhaps, is that it makes sense to come up with an equally detailed plan for how to adapt afterward.” (adaptation and the red queen effect) 

“Our expertise is the result of the training provided by thousands of experts around the world, and the support provided by thousands of technicians in five different space agencies.” (scale) 

“The best way to contribute to a brand-new environment is not by trying to prove what a wonderful addition you are. It’s by trying to have a neutral impact, to observe and learn from those who are already there, and to pitch in with grunt work wherever possible.” (ecosystem) 

“When you’re the least experienced person in the room, it’s not the time to show off. You don’t yet know what you don’t know – and regardless of your abilities, your experience and your level of authority, there will definitely be something you don’t know.” (circle of competence) 

“Ultimately, leadership is not about glorious crowning acts. It’s about keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it.” (hierarchical instincts) 

“If you start thinking that only your biggest and shiniest moments count, you’re setting yourself up to feel like a failure most of the time.” (map is not the territory)

Black Hole

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”--Orwell


Palm Sunday where a direct democracy movement overrides the traditional legal structure and gets the release of Barabbas.

Chris is ready for his surgery.
GoT tonight.
A classic Pirate game, hard fought and tight, with Pittsburgh ahead when Rodriguez gives up back-to-back homers in the eighth to lose it. So they lose exactly the kind of game they want to play.
The Pens play at noon. Chris thinks the bad ice in N.Y. really hurt them -- and that's a good point, but they still have to play better than these guys. 

Season 7 finale of GoT currently holds the record for the most-watched episode of any HBO show ever, with 12.1 million viewers. Game of Thrones live-debut audience has grown an average of 37 percent year over year. Sunday’s episode should clock in at around 14 million live viewers.

Baltimore Orioles first baseman Chris Davis’ historic streak is finally behind him.  The struggling slugger hit a two-RBI single off of Red Sox pitcher Rick Porcello in the top of the first inning of Saturday’s game at Fenway Park, ending a brutal string of 54 hitless at-bats that stretched back to September 14th of last season. Davis had surpassed the record held by former Los Angeles Dodgers utilityman Eugenio Velez (46 ABs) set back in 2011. 

Last year, Davis also set an unflattering record after posting a .168 batting average over the course of 128 games and 522 plate appearances. That batting average is the worst for any qualified hitter in Major League Baseball history since the league adopted the current 162-game schedule.

The Orioles still owe Davis around $92 million in guaranteed money due to the contract extension that he signed in the off-season of 2015. That contract will be paid out in deferred payments through the 2037 season.

In 2014 he was suspended for amphetamine use. Uh oh.

Clive Thompson draws an interesting parallel with capitalism which might have some significance: "Coders might have different backgrounds and political opinions, but nearly every one I’ve ever met found deep, almost soulful pleasure in taking something inefficient—even just a little bit slow—and tightening it up a notch. Removing the friction from a system is an aesthetic joy; coders’ eyes blaze when they talk about making something run faster or how they eliminated some bothersome human effort from a process."

In the city of Baltimore, approximately one out of every four babies is born as an opioid addict. 
What are the long range implications for an addicted infant?

This is what passed for political commentary in 2017: "The military apparatus of this country is about to be handed over to scum, who are beholden to scum, Russian scum! As things are today January 20th will not be an inauguration but rather the end of the United States as an independent country. Donald John Trump…is not a president; he is a puppet, put in power by Vladimir Putin. Those who ignore these elemental, existential facts—Democrats or Republicans—are traitors to this country." (the esteemed Kieth Olbermann)

Purity can not abide a spot. ThinkProgress, the news organ that is a project of, though editorially independent from, the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, put out a video noting that Sanders had stopped maligning millionaires—choosing, instead, to direct his ire at billionaires—when he became a millionaire himself.

The video accompanied a more nuanced article reflecting on the irony of Sanders dragging his feet in releasing his tax returns out of a desire to hide his wealth while President Trump refused to release tax returns in order to keep secret that he wasn’t as rich as he boasted.

The amygdala, the body’s alarm circuit for fear lies in an almond-shaped mass of nuclei deep in the brain’s temporal lobe. The amygdala, from the Greek word for almond, controls autonomic responses associated with fear, arousal, and emotional stimulation and has been linked to neuropsychiatric disorders, such as anxiety disorder and social phobias. It is a big target for research because of the prevalence of anxiety in the modern world. It appeared in an Atlantic article on Holbrooke so I bet it becomes very popular as a meme.

Wes Johnson, Twins pitching coach, personifies a trend in baseball: pairing tech-savvy coaches with a generation of players who crave actionable data. The coach’s pitching background is largely irrelevant; like Johnson, the new pitching coaches for the Los Angeles Angels (Doug White), the Seattle Mariners (Paul Davis) and the Cincinnati Reds (Derek Johnson, formerly of the Milwaukee Brewers) never pitched in an affiliated professional league.

New York, with 8.5 million residents and a population density of 28,000 people per square mile.

According to the Census Bureau, nearly two-thirds of the US population live in cities — but those cities take up just 3.5 percent of the nation’s land area. In 2006, a detailed federal government study of land use in the United States reported that “urban land plus rural residential areas together comprise 154 million acres, or almost 7 percent of total US land area.” Our country is 93 percent empty.

At 28,000 people per square mile, the nation’s entire population would fit comfortably in the combined area of Delaware and Maryland. 

On this day in 1912 the Titanic struck the iceberg. In 1865, Lincoln was shot.

                                                             Black Hole

This is a picture of a black hole, or rather how it looked fifty-five million years ago, the first picture of its kind. This is an extraordinary event--where light is casting its own shadow.
We are entering a world of general belief, if not clear understanding. We believe that this black hole has a mass 6.5-billion times that of the Sun, but that is truly beyond our real understanding. Like entangled particles or 0/0, we sort of get it but really don't.
Ned quizzed us if light has mass. Well, it is subject to gravity. Light can dislodge electrons from the atoms of several metals. (Photoelectric Effect)  So it has elements of a particle. And it has momentum. Momentum is a function of mass and acceleration, so it must have mass. But it doesn't. He's right; I looked it up--but, while I now know it, I do not understand it. Like infinite universes. Like entangled particles. Like consciousness developing from non-consciousness. We now describe and simply believe.
We are beyond empiricism. Science now requires faith. 

Slide 1 of 146: The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) -- a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration -- was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow. This breakthrough was announced in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5-billion times that of the Sun.

Full screen

1/146 SLIDES © .nsf.gov

 

Cosmonauts

The joint Russian-American space flight aborted when an engine blew up and the two managed to return to Earth safely. NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin are in what NASA director Jim Bridenstine described as "good condition" after surviving an emergency landing after a booster failure on a Russian Soyuz rocket Thursday.

The Russian space problems are rarely this public.

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He was the first human to journey into outer space when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961.

 

It is said that eighteen cosmonauts died in the Russian space effort. (Gagarin himself was said to have died in a "jet accident.")  

Starman, The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, is a book about Gagarin that contains some information about e Russian program,Gagarin, his friend Vladimir Komorov and the launch in April, 23, 1967. 

 

The men were both assigned the doomed Earth-orbiting mission Soyuz 1 and both knew the space capsule was not safe, according to Starman. Komarov, who was married with two children, knew he would die but refused to back out of the mission. Gagarin would be his replacement and Komarov didn't want his friend to die. When asked why he couldn't just refuse to go, Komarov said: 'If I don't make this flight, they'll send the backup pilot instead."

'That's Yura,' he said referring to Gagarin. '...and he'll die instead of me. We've got to take care of him.' Komarov then burst into tears.

On inspection the Soyuz 1 had 203 structural problems - problems that would make it dangerous to navigate in space. But..first things first.

No one dared tell then Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev about the faults however for fear of being demoted, fired or sent to diplomatic Siberia. The mission went ahead as planned.

It was planned a second rocket would go up with two cosmonauts and Komorov would transfer to the second ship and all three would return together. When the antennas didn't open properly, power was compromised and navigation of the ship proved difficult, the following day's launch was cancelled. Komorov was doomed.

 
When the capsule did began its eventual descent the parachutes failed to open - a small canopy came out but failed to pull the larger one from its storage bay. A backup parachute then became entangled with it.

The final words of doomed Russian cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, were picked up by U.S. intelligence, according to the book. As Komarov hurtled towards earth and certain death in the stricken Soyuz 1 craft, he could be heard screaming and cursing the 'people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.'

First things first.

We are the Moon

Delicious, from Shapiro:

"On Thursday evening, Ryan Gosling made international news when he justified the fact that the new Damien Chazelle biopic of Neil Armstrong will skip the whole planting the American flag on the moon thing. Gosling, a Canadian, explained, “I think this was widely regarded in the end as a human achievement and that’s how we chose to view it.”

It’s telling that the Left seems to attribute every universal sin to America, and every specific victory to humanity as a whole. Slavery: uniquely American. Racism: uniquely American. Sexism: uniquely American. Homophobia: uniquely American. Putting a man on the moon: an achievement of humanity."

 

And these people do not see the irony. The stimulus to this extraordinary accomplishment was nationalism, the anxiety that the Russian program would surpass--and threaten--the United States. Still, Armstrong--and the Americans--tried nobly to share the event symbolically with the world with "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

And the one thing these world unifiers should understand is symbolism.

Sunday/Universe

Fewer than 600 of the nearly 108 billion people who’ve existed on this planet have seen it from orbit. That rare experience, along with their advanced science degrees, makes astronauts seem uniquely qualified to answer the question: Are we alone in the universe?
Several of them sat at a small conference table in Los Angeles, along with filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, at an event for the series One Strange Rock, which debuts Monday on National Geographic.The film is no David Attenborough stroll through nature. Instead, Aronofsky (of Mother! and Black Swan fame) mainlines wonder, juxtaposing intimate images from Earth with sweeping shots from the International Space Station.
The theme is clear: Life on Earth is miraculous. Out of a nearly infinite combination of possibilities, the conditions were right for single-celled organisms to rise from inorganic material, which evolved sheltered by Earth's magnetic field and ozone, with a bounty of oxygen and water to support them.


"You look at all these systems … and it’s amazing all the things that have to come together to make this grand reality happen," Aronofsky said.

So, having seen the blue marble of Earth from space, do astronauts think there's life on other planets?

It's complicated.
The reason alien life seems likely is the same reason it's so hard to find. The universe is big. So freaking big.

"We've basically proven that every star has planets," said Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who has spent 4,000 hours in space. "Then you start doing the math."

The math isn't easy. How many stars are in the universe? Well, that depends on the size of the universe. We're able to observe the cosmic microwave background (CMB), radiation formed around 400,000 years after the Big Bang. It tells us the observable universe goes back around 14 billion years. But there could be something beyond the CMB, or even other universes contained in a massive "multiverse."

Within the constraints of the observable universe, there could be 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or septillion) stars, according to astronomer David Kornreich. (He conceded to Space.com that the number could be a gross underestimate.)
If every one of those stars has at least one planet, then, well, it seems inconceivable that life wouldn't exist elsewhere.
(from Mashable)

Bluford

Guion Stewart Bluford II was born in Philadelphia in 1942. From an early age, “Guy” was fascinated with flight and decided he wanted to design and build airplanes. In 1964, he graduated from Penn State with a degree in aerospace engineering. Deciding he’d need to know how to fly planes if he wanted to build them, he entered the U.S. Air Force and graduated with his pilot wings in 1965.
He was assigned to a fighter squadron in Vietnam, where he flew 144 combat missions. After combat service, he became a flight instructor and in the 1970s went on to receive a master’s degree and doctorate in aerospace engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology.
In 1979, he was accepted into the U.S. astronaut program. He made his first flight in 1983 as a mission specialist on the eighth shuttle mission.
U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Guion S. Bluford became the first African American to travel into space with the space shuttle Challenger third mission. It was the first night launch of a space shuttle, and many people stayed up late to watch the spacecraft roar up from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 2:32 a.m.
The Challenger spent six days in space, during which time Bluford and his four fellow crew members launched a communications satellite for the government of India, made contact with an errant communications satellite, conducted scientific experiments, and tested the shuttle’s robotic arm. Just before dawn on September 5, the shuttle landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California
He later flew three more shuttle missions, logging a total of 700 hours in orbit. After returning from NASA, he became vice president and general manager of an engineering company in Ohio.