- Today’s launch of Artemis II, and my background supporting the space program;
- A revelation about Bill Warren’s KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES!
- Noting the popularity of Project Hail Mary;
- Noting a GoodReads list;
- Radiohead’s The Gloaming.
So America’s latest moon rocket launched this afternoon, a relief to those of us who witnessed a space shuttle explode on launch some 40 years ago, and have watched every launch since then with trepidation.
I’ve always followed America’s space program approvingly; I grew up with it, in the 1960s and 1970s, and then went to work in 1982 supporting it. It was a thrill, part of witnessing a kind of manifest destiny of humanity to expand into space, maybe making all those exploratory dreams science fiction (even of Star Trek) possible. Of course we all knew at the time it was in part a political stunt, a ‘space race’ between the US and the USSR to demonstrate technological superiority, a battle in the so-called cold war. Once the US landed on the moon in 1969, Russia just sort of gave up and pretended not to care. Even as they kept trying, to the point of building a copy-cat space shuttle, the Buran, and trying to fly it once or twice. But they never went to the moon.
