You Learn Something Every Day

[bust]

:rotl:

 

http://youtu.be/-9Jp_XCvVto

[Coss]

Well he was right about the seventh heaven falling on ocean or dry land.

[StoneSoup]

"Eppur si muove" you pathetic Muslim savage. Our own worst religious morons duplicated your blind ignorance 500-years ago - but we got over it

 

From: http://www.ejectejec...ves/000035.html :

 

"Next time you look at the moon, challenge yourself to think of something: there are footprints up there. Footprints, and tire tracks. Also three used cars, and one golf ball.

 

Why are they there? Because we decided to go to the moon, that's why. What a typically arrogant, unilateral, American conceit! But you know what?

 

That footprint ' you know the picture ' will still be there, unchanged, a million years from now. In ten million years, it might begin to soften a little around the edges. But in a billion years ' a thousand million summers from this one ' it will still be there, next to glistening pyramids of gold and aluminum junk decaying under the steady cosmic drizzle of micrometeorite hits.

 

Eventually, in about five billion years, the sun will run out of hydrogen and start burning helium. When it does, it will begin to swell, consuming Mercury, then Venus as it enters its Red Giant phase. The forests will burn to ash, the oceans boil into steam and then be blown into deep space along with the rest of the atmosphere. Life will have been long gone.

 

But on the moon, there will remain six scraps of colored cloth. Red and white stripes peeking out from the dull grey lunar soil; perhaps a star or two on a faded blue field as the sun reaches out to reclaim her children. Very likely they will be the last, best preserved monuments to our presence as a species on the face of the third planet now burning to a cinder below.

 

But eventually, they will burn too. The sun will contract to a white dwarf, the inner solar system nothing but black cinders, the outer planets shrunken and frozen corpses. Perhaps fifteen billion years from now, a time as far in the future as time goes into the past, there will be nothing here except a burnt-out and cold white dwarf.

 

But somewhere out there, somewhere, there will be four battered, unrecognizable hunks of aluminum and titanium and gold, spinning through deep space, their names recalling the spirit in which they were hurled into the abyss: Pioneer, and Voyager. And the day before the Universe dies, you'll still be able to dimly make out the stripes and star-spangled square, and read the words in the ancient language, from a dead race in the far distant past, when the stars were young and alive: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

 

There are at least five nations on the earth that had the technical skill, not to mention the money, to do something as grand and noble ' as immortal -- as this. Yet only one has done so. Why us? Why not them?

 

Confidence. That's why."

 

 

That is one of the best pieces of writing that i have ever read. To priove the quality of the author's writing, go the link that I referenced above, and read the humorous anecdote that precedes the above section. It creates a great, down-to-earth context for the sentiment that I quoted above.

 

And then, to cement your respect for Bill Whittle, and to stiffen your disdain for the Muslim shitstain in the video clip, go read http://www.ejectejec...ves/000033.html part of which I will quote here:

 

"But the crew of Columbia had a much larger helping of joy ' sixteen days in orbit, almost a hundred sunrises and sunsets, playing weightless choo-choo trains through narrow tunnels and tweaking gravity's tail good and long and hard ' and the Columbia Seven would be destined to pay for that by several minutes of knowing that they were about to die.

 

As they strapped themselves in for the long, quiet ride home, they had the satisfaction of a job so well done that NASA was calling it the textbook mission.

 

Rick Husband took his six crewmembers rock climbing during their years of training. He wanted to bond them into more than a crew. He did: he made them into a family. There's a picture of them in shorts and sunglasses, atop that mountain, admiring the view. They look like they'd known each other since grade school.

 

I'll bet they talked about that day as they pulled down their visors, and Willie McCool pitched the Orbiter on its back for the de-orbit burn. They talked about who was waiting for them, where they would go, what they would have for dinner.

 

As Columbia began to press against the first thin wisps of air, a little hint of gravity, a little push at the small of their backs must have felt strange after sixteen days of weightlessness. But it was time to go home. And like all coworkers facing the end of a close assignment and weeks and months of hard work together, I know they planned to get together over the years. I know Laurel and Mike were talking about their families, Dave and Kalpana already grinning about being the old salts next time and how much they would miss this team, this family, in all of their future rides on the bullet. Ilan Ramon must have invited them all to his house in Israel, perhaps a few years from now when things had settled down a little. It's beautiful there. I know that they meant it too, that these were not idle platitudes but real offers from people who knew they would be friends for the rest of their lives.

 

And so they were.

 

Perhaps ten minutes before eight am on Saturday morning, Rick Husband and Willie McCool started to pay attention to the data coming from the left wing sensors. It was 30 degrees warmer than normal in the left wheel well. Not much, considering the 2-3000 degrees on the leading edge of their wings and nose, but something to pay attention to. Anomalies are never good. There are no pleasant surprises in the flying business.

By 7:55 things were looking worse ' a lot worse. Unbenownst to the crew, telemetry beamed to the ground showed that readings from the heat sensors in the left wing started to rise, and then dropped to zero. They were failing, in a pattern expanding away from the left wheel well. Tire pressures were way high on the left side, and then those sensors failed too.

 

Sensors fail all the time. But this was different. This was a pattern, and it was spreading. And something was starting to pull the ship to the left.

I don't know the words he used, but I can hear the tone perfectly in my head, because it's exactly the same tone I've heard dozens of times on cockpit voice recorders. It's concern. Alarm, even. But it's cool. Disciplined.

 

All right, we've got a problem here...

 

The Pilot and Mission Commander probably never exchanged the knowing look that we'd see in the movie. They were too busy working the problem. But in the two seats behind them, and the three below, those five brave passengers looked at each other and now the smiles and the grins were gone.

Something was wrong with Columbia's left wing. The air that should be slipping over and under her like water off the back of a duck had found something to hold on to: almost certainly some missing tiles knocked loose by insulating foam coming off the External Tank. But 3000 degree ionized air was pushing into that wing, and heat sensors were winking out one by one because they were being burned through by gas far hotter and sharper than that at the end of a blowtorch.

 

Guys, we're in real trouble here.

 

The Commander would have told them. I have no doubt of this at all. You love and respect those people, people who have shown courage the likes of which we will never know. These are not babies, not shrieking, hysterical, self-centered celebrities either. These are astronauts. They deserve to know.

 

The air pushing backward and into that left wing continued to yaw the nose of the orbiter to the left. This cannot be allowed to happen ' the ship will disintegrate if she doesn't come in at exactly the right angle. So the computers flying Columbia commanded the aircraft to roll right, to bring that left wing forward using the rudder and elevons, the controls on the wing and tail that made Columbia an airplane and not merely a space capsule.

 

It wasn't working.

 

Columbia still pulled hard to the left, so hard that the computers fired the attitude control rockets on the nose to try and force it back into the relative wind. When that happened, when they heard the roar of those rockets firing in a last desperate effort to keep that ship intact, and when the rockets fired again, and kept firing, Rick Husband and Willie McCool must have known that they were not going home that day.

 

Guys, it's Rick. I don't think we're gonna make it.

 

And I know what courage did for these people. I know they looked at each other and nodded, and whether they actually said goodbye I know it was in their eyes. We know it. We know. We saw it on the deck of the Titanic, in the aisles on United Flight 93. On some level, they had all said goodbye to their families and their lives before they walked through that circular hatch, right below the word COLUMBIA.

 

When PSA Flight 182 collided with a small plane over San Diego in 1978, and dove straight into the ground trailing fire from the wing, the last words on the Cockpit Voice Recorder was a calm, level, 'Ma, I love you.'

 

And in that last second, there may just have been enough time, as that bulkhead wall opened into golden and purple light, to smile and think, It was worth it. It was a great ride."

 

SS

[Flashermac]

I've always regretted that I missed watching the first lunar landing because I had other things to do at the moment in the Central Highlands of the RVN.

 

 

[pasathai1]

could be after all this time their headgear acts like blinders on a horse