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SpaceX Launch


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Despite NASA’s insistence that the public stay safe by staying home, spectators gathered along beaches and roads hours in advance.

Among them was Neil Wight, a machinist from Buffalo, New York, who staked out a view of the launch pad from a park in Titusville.

“It’s pretty historically significant in my book, and a lot of other people’s books. With everything that’s going on in this country right now, it’s important that we do things extraordinary in life,” Wight said. “We’ve been bombarded with doom and gloom for the last six, eight weeks, whatever it is, and this is awesome. It brings a lot of people together.”

https://apnews.com/da66485df4d82c055ce9d6b84a20e450

During the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs, NASA relied on aerospace contractors to build spacecraft according to the agency’s designs. NASA owned and operated the ships.

Under the new, 21st-century partnership, aerospace companies design, build, own and operate the spaceships, and NASA is essentially a paying customer on a list that could eventually include non-government researchers, artists and tourists. (Tom Cruise has already expressed interest.)

“What Elon Musk has done for the American space program is he has brought vision and inspiration that we hadn’t had” since the shuttle’s retirement, Bridenstine said.

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10 hours ago, bob_sauve28 said:

When I first read about how we have to rely on Russia to launch things I thought it was a joke. Just really sad. 

Sad AND sickening! We dealt with this for 9 years.

Thanks to Mr. Musk, that changed.

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So I was not feeling well last night and flopped down in my chair and watched a science fiction movie Ad Astra with Brad Pitt. He produced and starred in the movie and got Donal Southerland and Tommy Lee Jones roles in it. I disliked the movie but watched the whole thing, as I am interested in astronomy and space so I gave it a try. The one fact that just leaped out of the movie was that the script was just a rehashing of the basic plot line from Apocalypse Now, which, so I am told, was created with the book Heart of Darkness in mind. Pitt’s father (Tommy Lee Jones) has gone crazy off near  the far off planet of Neptune and Pitt has to go find him and terminate his command. And just like Martin Sheen having to travel the river to find Marlon Brando, Pitt sets off into the vastness of space to find Jones. Both movies have at their center a psychological angst. For Sheen in Apocalypse Now it’s the insanity of war and pointlessness of all the killing. The most iconic line from Apocalypse Now is Robert Duval declaring, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” He then sadly states, “You know, some day this war will be over,” as he hangs his head dejectedly. Senseless, but entertaining. For Pitt in Ad Astra, it’s the emptiness of space and the lonliness of space travel from its confined crafts, bureaucratic impersonal nature and lack of a natural environment. Pitt has to continually take “psychological evaluations” because it’s well known the space environment can cause depression and other mental disorders, but when Pitt opens up to the computer about his real feelings it’s just spits back at him bureaucracies mumbo jumbo and thanks him. The whole movie is his dialogue and it’s not very good. He ends up killing a bunch of people and then his own dad and comes home to earth finally where he is welcomed very nicely. Strange movie. Dark, depressing and nothing to hang your hat on. 

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