Tag: history

Abraham Lincoln – an annual tribute

6:01 pm

An evening pause: On this, the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, I must once again honor his memory, most especially because the Marxist, anti-American bigots who are now running roughshod across our once free nation wish to cancel him by actually accusing the man who freed the slaves of being a racist.

And though he freed the slaves, I think Lincoln’s most enduring contribution to American history, a contribution that now has sadly been lost, was his limitless good will for everyone, even to those who hated him and wished to kill him. Had he not been assassinated, American history might have been far better because Lincoln would have had the clout to ease the worst elements of Reconstruction, while forcing through reforms in the former southern slave states.

The modern Democrats in Congress — and their supporters nationwide — might benefit by reading some history about Lincoln. Alas, I have no hope of this.

As I wrote for last year’s tribute,

Lincoln stood for freedom for all humans, the central heart of the American experiment. He was willing and did die for that stance. We should all be willing to do no less.

The video below shows probably every photograph ever taken of Lincoln, in chronological order. You can see him age and mature. You can also see a gaunt and serious man who appears to care deeply about whatever he does.

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Fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 14 lunar landing

9:22 am

Apollo 14 as seen by LRO
Click for full image.

In honor of the fiftieth anniversary today of the landing of Apollo 14 on the Moon, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) science team has used images from the spacecraft to map out what the astronauts did on the surface, as shown in the reduced image to the right. The orange and teal lines indicate the routes followed during the two EVAs, with the pink triangles indicating stopping points along the way.

Unlike Apollo 11 and 12, which focused on engineering goals such as landing precisely on the Moon, Apollo 14 focused on addressing science goals. Antares (lunar module) landed in the Fra Mauro highlands, the original destination of the failed Apollo 13 mission, essentially taking on that mission’s objectives. This was the first crewed landing in the lunar highlands and not in the mare.

The Apollo 14 astronauts who landed on the Moon, Alan Shepard (Commander) and Edgar Mitchell (Lunar Module Pilot), completed two extra-vehicular activities (EVAs) while on the surface. They spent a total of 9 hours and 22 minutes setting up equipment, taking photographs, collecting samples, and exploring.

This was the last mission where the astronauts had to walk. The next three Apollo missions brought a rover with them, so that they could drive to their research sites.

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Beals Science – Resurrecting a carbide lamp

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Long time cavers are very familiar with the carbide lamp, as it was used routinely until around 1998, when LED lights arrived and finally superseded it.

Until then, the advantage of a carbide light was the quality of the light it produced, a soft bright glow rather than the harsh reflective rings produced by older electric lights.

The disadvantage however was the endless fiddling required to keep them working. For example, near the end of this video when he finally gets the light to work, he turns up the water flow to brighten the light. I guarantee that very soon the light would go out, as he was flooding the carbide. The water drip had to be precisely right. Too slow and not enough gas. Too fast and too much water.

I personally hated carbide lights because of that fiddling, especially because lamps made after 1970 were junk and didn’t work well. Most cavers who used carbide would scour yard sales to find old lights like this one, as older carbide lamps were made well and would work reliably.

Hat tip Jeff Poplin.

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We are about to find out who our real friends are

1:59 pm

Sergei Krikalev on the space shuttle
Russian Sergei Krikalev on the space shuttle, February 1994.

When in 2002 I was writing my space history, Leaving Earth, I spent more than a month interviewing Russian astronauts in Moscow. Many of those individuals had also flown on the American space shuttle during the initial Mir-Shuttle joint missions followed by the start of the assembly of ISS, which had given them a unique opportunity to get an outsider’s perspective on American culture.

One man Sergei Krikalov, was especially unique. He not only was the first Russian to train at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, he was the first Russian to fly on the space shuttle, and the first to enter ISS’s first module after launch. Because of that experience, he also spoke excellent English, which meant he could describe his experiences to me directly, and not through an interpreter.

When it came to American culture, he noted how as a Russian, he was appalled at the empty nature of American friendships.
» Read more

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Auld Land Syne – Freedom mix

6:01 pm

An evening pause: This mix was apparently put together just after 9/11, and includes many of the most iconic sound-bites from the 20th century. One of the last lines however must speak to the new 21st century, as it appears many Americans have forgotten what it means to be an American.

“We’re not gonna be stopped! We’re not gonna be deterred! We’re not gonna stay at home! We’re not gonna be afraid!

“We’re gonna live our lives as Americans!”

God bless. Let us work to return freedom to America in 2021.

Auld Lang Syne – (Freedom mix) from Don Krasley on Vimeo.

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James Doohan’s ashes have been on ISS for the past dozen years

3:34 pm

Video game developer Richard Garriott admitted in an interview this week that when he flew to ISS as a space tourist in 2008 he smuggled some of the ashes of the late James Doohan, who played Scotty on Star Trek, to hide there.

[Garriott] printed three cards with Doohan’s photo on them, sprinkling ashes inside and then laminating them. He then hid the cards within the flight data file, which was cleared for the flight (the cards were not). “Everything that officially goes on board is logged, inspected and bagged — there’s a process, but there was no time to put it through that process,” he said.

…According to Garriott, one of the cards is on display in Chris Doohan’s home, while another was sent floating in space, where it would have inevitably burned up when re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere.

The third card, however, remains in the ISS, hidden beneath the cladding on the floor of the space station’s Columbus module, where Garriott hid it. “As far as I know, no one has ever seen it there and no one has moved it,” he said. “James Doohan got his resting place among the stars.” Since being hidden in the ISS, Doohan’s ashes have travelled nearly 1.7 billion miles through space, orbiting Earth more than 70,000 times.

I hope that now that Garriott has revealed the location of that third card, the petty dictators at NASA and Roscosmos won’t insist that it be removed. For ISS having the ashes of the world’s best space engineer on board can only be good luck.

And it might encourage the government workers at NASA and Roscomos to follow Scotty’s most sage advice, which to paraphrase is “Always under-predict and over-perform. It keeps their expectations low.”

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Werner Klemperer & John Banner – Silent Night

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Silent Night is followed by Robert Clary singing a French carol. All three were actors from the 1960s television comedy series, Hogan’s Heroes, with Klemperer playing the Nazi prison commander, Banner the foolish guard (“I know nothing!!!”), and Clary the French prisoner.

I don’t know exactly when this aired, but it was likely in the late 1960s. It signals the good will fundamental to western civilization. The Germans had only two decades earlier put the world through a horrible war. Still, Americans were glad to hear two Germans immigrants sing this gentle song in their native language, despite the evils that nation had subjected the world to so recently.

The war was over. We are all fallible humans. Time to forgive, and move on.

Hat tip Phill Oltmann.

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House passes bill that attempts to protect Apollo Moon sites

9:10 am

The House today passed a bill that would require any American business planning a Moon mission to agree to not disturb the Apollo lunar landing sites.

[The bill] requires any federal agency that issues a license to conduct a lunar activity to require the applicant to agree to abide by recommendations in the 2011 NASA report “NASA’s Recommendations to Space-Faring Entities: How to Protect and Preserve the Historic and Scientific Value of U.S. Government Artifacts” and any successor recommendations, guidelines or principles issued by NASA.

All well and good, but this does nothing to stop other nations from touching those sites. Moreover, making all of those sites and whatever the astronauts did there totally sacrosanct is not reasonable. On the later Apollo landings the astronauts used a rover to travel considerable distances. Should every spot the astronauts visited by now considered holy? If anything, scientists will wish to return and gather more data at these locations to better understand the initial Apollo results.

Not that any of this really matters. In the long run the decision on how much these sites should be protected will be made by the people who live on the Moon. I suspect, as pioneers living on the edge of survival, they will have less interest in making memorials to past achievements and be more focused on getting things done, now.

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Mysterious object in solar orbit identified as upper stage for Surveyor 2

9:14 am

Since August astronomers have been trying to figure out the nature of a mysterious object in solar orbit that did not match their expectations for either a comet or an asteroid. Dubbed 2020 SO, astronomers have now identified it as the upper stage booster used to send the unmanned lunar lander Surveyor 2 towards the Moon in 1966.

Surveyor 2 was a failure when it began tumbling and crashed into the Moon instead of doing a soft landing. Its upper stage meanwhile was sent on a path that would have it miss the Moon and go into orbit around the Sun. That orbit finally brought it back to Earth this year.

2020 SO was captured by Earth’s gravity in November and came within 27,400 miles from Earth on December 1. That’s when Reddy and his colleagues at the IRTF were able to capture the infrared spectrum of another Centaur D rocket booster—this time from a 1971 launch of a communication satellite. When they compared that spectrum to the data gathered about 2020 SO, the spectra matched. 2020 SO is also a Centaur rocket booster, most likely the one used for the Surveyor 2 mission.

2020 SO is now moving away from the Earth and should escape Earth’s gravity within a few months, at which point it will follow a new solar orbit. But astronomers expect it to return to Earth in 2036, and they will be ready to learn even more when it does.

This booster is essentially an early example of space archeology. Someday colonists in space will go and catch it to bring it back to one of their museums on the Moon or Mars, to be studied and admired as a major marker of their own past history.

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Chuck Yeager, 1923-2020

9:48 pm

R.I.P. Chuck Yeager, the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound passed away today at the age of 97.

A World War II flying ace, Gen. Yeager achieved his greatest fame by flying on Oct. 14, 1947, the experimental Bell X-1 at the speed of sound, Mach 1, in level flight at 45,000 feet — the first man to do so.

The achievement was not announced to the public though until June 1948 for security reasons.

Yeager epitomized the greatest generation, flying in combat in World War II, and commanding fighter squadrons in both the Korean and Vietnamese wars. More significantly, his 1947 supersonic flight was achieved with two broken ribs, caused when he fell from a horse the week before. He told none of his commanders, and flew anyway.

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Pearl Harbor: The Last Word

6:01 pm

A evening pause: On the anniversary of Japan’s unprovoked sneak attack on the United States, let’s hear what it was like to be a sailor on the U.S. battleships sunk during that attack, from interviews recorded four years ago for the 75th anniversary of the attack.

And did I mention it was an unprovoked sneak attack? The Japanese of that time brought the war upon themselves. Hiroshima and Nagasaki was their fault, not ours.

I wonder, would today’s Americans have the will to win, for freedom and the rule of law, as 1940s Americans did? Based on our response to 9/11, I think not. Based on our terror of a flu-like illness today, I know not. The tragedy of this is beyond words.

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SpaceX sets numerous launch records in placing 60 more Starlink satellites in orbit

10:23 pm

Falcon 9 booster landing for a record 7th time

Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight broke a whole bunch of new launch records in launching another sixty Starlink satellites into orbit using its Falcon 9 rocket.

First, the leaders in the 2020 launch race:

31 China
22 SpaceX
12 Russia
5 ULA
5 Rocket Lab

The US now leads China 35 to 31 in the national rankings.

For SpaceX, this launch established the following landmarks for the company:
» Read more

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Debussy plays Debussy – Clair de Lune

6:01 pm

An evening pause: As the youtube webpage notes, “This is not an acoustic recording. This is a recording obtained by piano roll.”

Rolls for the reproducing piano were generally made from the recorded performances of famous musicians. Typically, a pianist would sit at a specially designed recording piano, and the pitch and duration of any notes played would be either marked or perforated on a blank roll, together with the duration of the sustaining and soft pedal. Reproducing pianos can also re-create the dynamics of a pianist’s performance by means of specially encoded control perforations placed towards the edges of a music roll, but this coding was never recorded automatically. Different companies had different ways of notating dynamics, some technically advanced (though not necessarily more effective), some secret, and some dependent entirely on a recording producer’s handwritten notes, but in all cases these dynamic hieroglyphics had to be skillfully converted into the specialized perforated codes needed by the different types of instrument.

Thus, we are listening now to a player piano, replaying the music as Debussy played it.

Hat tip Tom Biggar.

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The Apollo 12 crew’s excursions on the Moon, 51 years ago

8:25 am

In celebration of the anniversary this week of the Apollo 12 mission to the Moon in November 1969, the science team for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) have created a wonderful animation showing step-by-step where and when Pete Conrad and Alan Bean walked during their two EVAs on the lunar surface.

That video is below. It highlights strongly the need of any future short-term mission to any planetary landing to have a vehicle on board. Conrad and Bean accomplished a lot during their two four-hour walks, but nowhere near as much as they could have accomplished if they could have driven about on their EVAs. In fact, in the 1960s NASA had already recognized this, and was to put a rover on the last three Apollo lunar landings.

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HBO to create six-part “scripted” series on Musk and SpaceX

10:36 am

Where NOT to get your facts about SpaceX’s history: HBO today announced that it is going to create a six-part “scripted” drama series describing the history of Elon Musk and SpaceX.

In terms of story, the small-screen narrative will follow Musk as he develops the first SpaceX rocket and launches it into orbit with a handpicked team of engineers on a remote island in the Pacific. His dream of humanity colonizing the universe takes one step closer to reality with the first (and successful) manned Falcon 9/Crew Dragon mission on May 30, 2020. The participating NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, have since returned to Earth from the International Space Station.

From my experience writing non-fiction screenplays for cable television when I was still in the movie business, I can guarantee that this drama will have very little connection to reality, and is more likely to get numerous basic facts wrong. It will thus accomplish nothing but to misinform anyone who watches it.

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Trump: He kept his promises

10:09 am

Trump at a recent rally
He does what he says.

In my long life, I have seen many politicians come and go. The one abiding constant for them all was that you could expect them to break their promises once elected.

Until 2000 Democrats routinely spouted moderate and even conservative ideas during campaigns, only to quickly move left once elected. Some, like Bill Clinton, lied routinely on all matters, simply to please whoever he was talking to. After he left office Democrats have since been more public about their socialist and even communist ideologies, but still they have often lied whenever they found it convenient, such as Barack Obama’s support for normal marriage, until he found he could support perversion and get away with it.

Republicans have been even more dishonest. For decades they would paint themselves as the defenders of small and limited government, of freedom, of balanced budgets, only to throw all those ideas out the window once they gained control. Until 1994 they could make these claims without fear of revealing their untruthfulness, since they had not run both houses of Congress since just after World War II. They were the loyal opposition, whining from the sidelines about Democratic overreach.

After 1994 that excuse disappeared, and the result was blatant lying. Even though the Republican Congress during the latter half of Bill Clinton’s administration managed to balance the federal budget for several years, they did not do this by reducing government. No, all they did was allow inflation to catch up so that a thriving economy would cover their big budgets. No agency got trimmed. No agency got eliminated. Power and money continued to flow into Washington and into the pockets of politicians of both parties.

Under George Bush Jr. this dishonesty became even more obvious. » Read more

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September 11, 2001 through the Eyes of a Child

9:27 am

Link here. The horror of that terrorist act, no different than the horrifying acts of rioting and looting dressed up as fake protests today, should not be forgotten. This article gives us possibly the most important perspective, the impact that horror had on the innocent children of the time.

Matthew John Bocci wrote the book Sway as a way to sort out his feelings. He was nine years old when his father died during the collapse of the World Trade Center. It took one week for the family to find out his father was dead. “Even though I knew he was dead, I still needed to find out the how. I became obsessed. I wondered if he had jumped, since he worked on the 105th floor and I saw all the smoke. My thoughts were that if he had jumped, maybe I could see him looking out a window beforehand. Even though I found out my dad did not jump, when I see the footage, it brings a lot of sadness. I look at it and think my father was in that building and he never had a chance to get out. In the book, I wrote, ‘What could you say, especially to a nine-year-old whose father was obliterated?'”

He went on to say, “My dad was selfless. He actually called my mom two minutes after the plane hit the building to tell her he loved her and us. He said goodbye. I now try to look at the positives he left behind. He was honorable, put family first, and was very humble. I think how brave he was, smart, resourceful, funny, determined, hardworking, and caring.”

Because of his father’s death, Matthew’s life spiraled out of control. He searched for answers and a father figure. Unfortunately, his Uncle Phil filled that role. He took advantage of Matthew’s grief by sexually abusing him. To cope, Matthew turned to drugs. But thankfully, after many years of drug abuse, he got himself straightened out, had his uncle arrested and convicted of child abuse, and is now five years sober.

To my mind, the worst result of both 9/11 and today’s riots is our society’s generally weak response. We never really did wipe out the scourge of Islamic terrorism after 9/11, which since then has only worsened. For children like Matthew, who lost his father, there is thus no closure or a feeling of justice.

And today we seem paralyzed to act against the home-grown terrorists in our midst, allowing them to commit some equally ugly acts while doing little to stop them. We must therefore ask ourselves, what are today’s children learning from this failure?

For evil to flourish good men need only do nothing. And sadly nothing is much of what America has been doing for the past two decades.

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John Ford’s The Searchers

6:01 pm

An evening pause: A very detailed look at some of the behind-the-scenes history for one of John Ford’s best westerns, The Searchers (1956), starring John Wayne.

This isn’t my favorite Ford film. I prefer My Darling Clementine (1946). Nonetheless, The Searchers is still one of the best, and this short documentary will also give you a feel for the actual American culture of the time, a culture that cared about the truth and tried to treat people with respect.

If you want to watch but save time, you can set the playing speed at 2X normal and understand everything completely.

Hat tip Tom Biggar.

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NASA’s first Orbiting Geophysical Observatory to burn up in atmosphere

11:11 am

The first of six Orbiting Geophysical Observatories, dubbed OGO-1, is set to to burn up in the atmosphere sometime in the next week.

Launched September 5, 1964, OGO-1 operated until 1969. It along with the five later OGO satellites were designed to study the Earth’s magnetic field as well as the Van Allen Belts across a solar minimum and maximum. Together they proved the magnetosphere was homogeneous, somewhat the same wherever data was obtained.

As the first such observatory, the spacecraft was also a technology test. Thus, the failure of its attitude control system, preventing about half its instruments from gathering data, was not really a failure. It laid the groundwork for all such research satellites to follow over the next half century.

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