God debunked in one image illustrating a billion words of ignorant Man.

"Over the uncontrollable"

The monkeys who invented God (Jesus Christ, spirituality, all the other wacky bible-thumpers, etc.) knew nothing about the Universe beyond the crap-covered ground at their monkey feet.

Hasn't even been 100 years now since the so-called Great Debate.

None of you cowards in your sheer terror of mortality will think about that.

Because it gives you nothing.

All TRUTH about the Universe does is to remind *you* that your life is pathetic and pointless and meaningless.

So that makes you gullible and that makes you susceptible to the scam-artists who work to sell Jesus to you. Because they need your money.

You make the world a worse place.

You are dumb and stupid and you make others dumb and stupid.








Kerry Burgess, May 04, 2018 7:06pm

People don't use Facebook because they want to read a lot of stuff.

They just want to see moronic pictures and GIFs that make them feel better for a few second of the clock about their pathetic and meaningless lives.

Me, I just remind them of why they hate their Boss.








Kerry Burgess, Aug 18, 2018 1:21pm

Bible-thumpers are definitely *not* going to read this note.

As soon as they get the slightest glimmer of my rational, well thought out explanation for why they are cowardly terrified of mortality, then they just tune out. They're junkies addicted to a ridiculous fantasy.

I am definitely not talking in person to potentially psychotic persons about mortality.

And all bible-thumpers are potentially psychotic.

That's why they're bible-thumpers.

The real world is terrifying to them and they are on the borderline of hysteria.








Kerry Burgess, Nov 18, 2016 5:05pm

You *do not* have "Faith".

You have FALSE HOPE.

You're a slacker.

You want something easy you don't have to work at and that a used salesman promised you offers big rewards. Rewards you definitely do not deserve.








Kerry Burgess, Feb 21, 2017 2:41pm

America was never built on anything religious, dullards.

America was built for the same old reason: money.

As with all phony "God" bible-thumpers and your delusions, King George believed he owned property in the United States because of his delusions about "God".

In primitive America, some clever lawyers decided that King George had no right to property ownership in the United States.

Bottom line: money.

I mean, they never helped out the colored man, at least not for over a hundred years. And then - again - only because of money.

In your delusions then you would have us believe that your so-called "God" hates black people.

Because a hell of a lot of black people lived and broke their backs working for the white man and then died and that's all they got.

But facts are meaningless to you.








Kerry Burgess, Dec 11, 2016 9:40pm

Circular reasoning (Latin: circulus in probando, "circle in proving"; also known as circular logic) is a logical fallacy in which the reasoner begins with what they are trying to end with. The components of a circular argument are often logically valid because if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning








Kerry Burgess, Feb 23, 2017 10:52pm

I haven't read much of your blog. So I don't know if you're serious about that fairy-tale fiction that is known as the "Holy Bible".

A professor of religion, in my opinion, if you're a person who really tries to believe that stuff, is an authority only in circular logic.








From 04/26/1920 to 07/21/2019 is 99 years, 2 months, 25 days

The Simpsons .jpg

twitter_christina-koch_07-21-2019_1.jpg



https://twitter.com/Astro_Christina/status/1152976199104286721

Twitter

Christina H Koch

Verified account

@Astro_Christina

9:18 AM - 21 Jul 2019

View of our crewmates arriving to @Space_Station yesterday. What a tremendously special day to launch. Welcome home @AstroDrewMorgan, @astro_luca and Alexander!








https://www.psychologytoday.com/za/blog/how-risky-is-it-really/201212/the-world-wont-end-and-neither-will-superstitions?amp

Psychology Today

David Ropeik

How Risky Is It, Really?

The World Won't End and Neither Will Superstitions

We look for omens and clues that give us a sense of control over the future.

Posted Dec 11, 2012

In case you haven’t heard, the world may end soon. Very soon. On December 21st at midnight, in fact, the last date on the Mayan Long Count Calendar. Tosh, you say. Just more whacky apocalyptophobia. Well, should we survive this latest Doomsday, in ten days we will only have made it to a new reason to fear the calendar. Triskaidekaphobes beware! Next year is 2013.

Scoff if you will, but the superstition about the number 13 is common enough that elevators in many high rise buildings, particularly hotels, go from floor 12 to 14. Ontario’s provincial roads go from Route 12 to Route 14. Don’t try and find #13 Rue anything in France. Or Gate #13 at many airports. Irish license plates normally end in the last two digits of the current year, but car dealers worried fewer people would buy cars next year to avoid plates that end in 13, so they got the government to change the rules so the license plates on cars sold in the first half of the year will end with 131, and 132 if sold from July through December.

article continues after advertisement

Romans were spooked by the number tredecim, ostensibly because Judas, betrayer of Jesus, was the 13th guest at the Last Supper, though the Bible says nothing of the seating order at that memorable meal. The Crucifixion was on a Friday, ergo paraskevidekatriaphobia, fear of Friday the 13th (Paraskeví =Friday in Greek), which makes September and December next year particularly scary since both feature a Friday the 13th. The Vikings got all triskaidekaphobic after the 13th God in the Norse pantheon, Loki, went from good guy to bad by killing the God Baldr, the God of joy and gladness, and then was the 13th guest to arrive at the funeral. Ancient Persians believed order was maintained by the 12 constellations of the Zodiac, each of which would keep the world running smoothly for 1,000 years, until the 13th century when things would collapse. Iranians today celebrate Sizdah Bedar, which translates to ‘getting rid of 13”, on the 13th of Favardin, the first month on the Iranian calendar. They celebrate outdoors with picnics, , at the end of which they ritually throw away the green sprouts brought to the picnic specifically to absorb all the ill fates of the coming year.

There are plenty of modern forms of triskaidekaphobia, of course. In 2007 Brussels Airlines had to repaint the logo on their planes when passengers noticed it was composed of 13 dots. In the British National Lottery, 13 was the least popular number in the Lotto (pick 6 numbers) game. Guess how many witches in a coven. Yup, 13. There is even an eerie triskaidekaphobic connection with the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar. It runs out of days at the end of the 13th b’ak’tun, the calendar’s grouping of years in units of 394 years. (insert ominous music here! DUNH DUNH DUHHHHHH!!!!!!

article continues after advertisement

Of course, 2013 is happy news for triskaidekaphiles, those who love the number 13. Egyptians did. The 13th and last rung on the ladder to eternity was where the soul found everlasting life. The little known 13th labor of Hercules – killing the lion of Cithaeron - did it for our hero, winning him the right to make love to each of King Thespius’s 50 daughters, one a night for 50 nights (the 14th labor?). Nobody turns down the extra donut in a baker’s dozen.

Of course 13, (and the version of it that occasionally falls of Fridays) is not the only number phobia. Many Asian cultures are tetraphobic, afraid of the number four. No mystery why. The word for four sounds like the word for death, so many buildings don’t have a 4th floor, a 14th, a 24th, etc. nor any floors between 39 and 50. (14 and 24 are particularly bad, since they sound like the words of ‘die for sure’ and ‘easy to die’). The navies of Taiwan and South Korea avoid the number 4 when they mark their ships.

And the best number phobia of all, semantically at least, is Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia, fear of the number 666, which is linked in the Bible (in Revelation 13….just sayin’) with Satan. After leaving the White House, Nancy Reagan famously had the address on the family home in Los Angeles changed from 666 to 668. On the other hand, Kabbalist Jews believe 666 represents creation and perfection of the world.

Which brings us to the point of this fun little excursion into numeric superstitions. They’re all about the same thing…finding some way of extracting meanings that give us a sense of control over the uncontrollable…our destinies…the future. Peter Bernstein’s wonderful book, Against the Gods. The Remarkable Story of Risk, describes how mathematicians mastered probability theory and allowed us to predict the future with reasonable accuracy, giving rise to everything from the insurance industry to decent poker playing. But most of us still feel at least a little powerless against fate, and powerlessness is scary, so we look for our talismans and signs and omens – whether in the stars or the tea leaves or the numbers – to give ourselves the illusion that we have some control over what is going to happen, a reassuring sense that we can in fact steer our flimsy boat against the stormy winds and currents of fate.

That’s what superstitions really are, in the end, just one more form of irrationality in the face of fear. But before you belittle the foolishness of those who think the world will end on a symbolic date or fret about the bad luck that certain numbers might bring, consider that one of your fears might make the coming year feel a little ominous as well. Ophidiophobes, beware. 2013 is the Chinese Year of the Snake.

twitter_christina-koch_07-21-2019_2.jpg








from my online journal as Kerry Burgess, Nov 24, 2016 8:32am

http://hvom.blogspot.com/2016/05/and-it-shall-come-to-pass-when-i-bring.html

"And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud"

I can't believe people are still asking this question, as I read today on the Internet:

"why cant we see the stars on live cam via the ISS?"

Shrieking Monkeys just cannot understand why the black sky on the planet Earth is NOT the same as the black sky from above the planet Earth.

ancestry_homer-burgess_1.jpg


http://www.roadrunnersauto.com/gen/burgess.shtml

Burgess

6th Generation

CHILDREN OF JAMES AND LINA BURGESS

Grace Burgess, born Abt. 1904. She married Herbert King 23 December 1919.
Homer Burgess, born Abt. 1906.
Ozie Burgess, born Abt. 1908.
Fletcher Burgess, born Abt. 1910.
Cecil Burgess, born Abt. 1913.
Icie Burgess, born Abt. 1916.
Lorence Burgess, born Abt. 1918.





https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/america-in-1915/462360/

The Atlantic

America in 1915: Long Hours, Crowded Houses, Death by Trolley

Bad news: No antibiotics. Good news: Streetcars, everywhere!

DEREK THOMPSON

FEB 11, 2016 [ excerpts by Kerry Burgess ]

The presidential campaign is replete with allusions to better times and eclipsed golden ages of American greatness. But in a new review from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economist Carol Boyd Leon paints a sociological portrait of America as it was 100 years ago, when technology was meager, financial ruin was one downturn away, war was ongoing in Europe, and the choices that Americans have come to expect—in their cars, clothes, food, and homes—were preceded by a monotonous consumer economy. In 1915, Americans walked everywhere (or took a streetcar, if they lived in cities), lived in three-generation homes that they rarely owned, ate almost as much lard as chicken, and spent Friday nights dancing to player pianos. In short: Everything was worse, except for the commute.

Here is a closer look at America, one century ago.

America suffered worse working conditions, in just about every way.

For men: Work for men was more widespread, more dangerous, worse paid, and, well, just more annoying. According to the 1920 census, 85 percent of men over 14 were in the labor force, compared with just 69 percent for men over 16 today. It was the dawn of scientific management, with factory workers introduced to a brand new office colleague, the time clock. Manufacturing workers averaged 55 hours at work per week, 10 percent more than self-reported averages today. And the jobs were more dangerous: With a fatality rate of 61 deaths per 100,000 workers, the workplace was about 30 times more dangerous than it is today.

For women: Women were much less likely to work, and in 1915, many were finding employment at elementary and high schools. The reason for women’s early entry into education in the U.S., however, is a little depressing. School boards preferred female teachers not only because they were seen as more loving, but also because they would do what male principals told them while accepting less than a man’s wage.

For the elderly: For those who did make it to old age (something of a feat back then), Social Security didn’t exist, and in bad times, poverty among the old was so bad that contemporaries wrote of growing old as if it were a dystopia—the “haunting fear in the winter of life.” In 1938 a writer with the American Association for Old-Age Security said "our modern system of industrial production has rendered our lives insecure to the point of despair.” The industrializing economy was no country for old men or women. As families moved off farms into cities and suburbs, it became harder for some old people to find work in factories, which ran on limber sinews and sweat. In the 40 years before 1920, the share of men over 65 working on farms dropped 39 percent.

America ate lard and cold cereal and paid a lot of money for it.

It’s hard to imagine many Americans begging to switch places with a 1915 gourmand. Food was not only less varied in 1915, but also considerably more expensive. The typical American spent one-third of his income on food 100 years ago, which is twice today’s share.

The early 20th century was a golden age of cold-cereal products—Corn Flakes, Quaker Puffed Rice and Puffed Wheat, and Shredded Wheat all came on the market between 1906 and 1912—but on the farm, people enjoyed a heartier meal of eggs and pancakes. Lunch at the office provided a logistical challenge, as in 1915, there existed no such thing as a plastic bag to keep a sandwich fresh. Instead, contemporary cookbooks called for keeping sandwiches moist by "wrapping [them] in a dry towel, covered with a towel wrung out of hot water.”

The average American ate roughly equivalent amounts of lard and chicken—11.5 pounds and 14 pounds, respectively, per year. One century later, the ratio has, blessedly, widened. Americans eat 57 pounds of chicken, compared to just 1.5 pounds of lard. But Americans, gluttons to their core, have replaced fat’s flavor with something even worse: Their sugar intake has jumped from 88 to 130 pounds in the last 100 years.

American home life was extremely crowded.

"The business of America is farming business," one might have said in 1915, but industrialization was slowly removing the “farming” part. America had one-third of its current population in 1915, and it was considerably more spread out. Half of all families lived in rural areas, or in towns with populations below 2,500.

America was a younger country, but had no concept of “teen-agers.”

In 1915, 100 million people lived in the United States, and more than half were under 25. One century later, the population is more than 300 million, but the share of people under age 25 has fallen to one-third. Meanwhile the share of people over 65 tripled, from 5 percent to 14 percent.

But in the early 20th century, the word “teen-ager” either didn’t exist or was scarcely used outside of development psychology. Since the term applies to a group of youngish people who hang out together, their invention required an insulated environment where teens could behave, well, teenagery. Teens didn’t create "high school." High schools created “teenagers."

As the U.S. economy shifted from a disparate agrarian society to a mass production machine, families relocated closer to cities and, at least initially, many sent their children to work. The movement to prevent kids from being forced to toil in mills encouraged compulsory education for teenagers. In 1920, just 28 percent of American youths between the ages of fourteen and seventeen were in high school. By 1930, 47 percent of this age group was attending high school. As young people spent more time in school, they developed their own customs in an environment away from work and family, and the possibility of a distinct teenage subculture became possible. It’s hard to imagine a teenage culture in an economy where every 16-year-old is expected to work with his father on the lathe, or in the fields.

The second key development in the creation of the teenager was the invention of cars. It might be a horrifying consideration for today’s singles, but a first date once meant an introductory chat in the living room with a girl’s parents. This might have been followed by a deliciously awkward family dinner.

But cars emancipated romance from the stilted small talk of the family parlor. Just about everything a modern single person considers to be a “date” was made possible, or permissible, but the invention and normalization of car-driven romance. (If you think Tinder and dating apps are destroying romance today, you would have hated cars in the 1930s.) The fear that young men and fast cars were upending romantic norms was widespread. The chorus of the 1909 Cole Porter song “Keep Away From the Fellow Who Owns an Automobile” is instructive:

Keep away from the fellow who owns an automobile

He'll take you far in his motor car

Too darn far from your Pa and Ma

If his forty horsepower goes sixty miles an hour say

Goodbye forever, goodbye forever

Americans didn’t drive: They walked, rode horses, and acrobatically dodged trolleys.

In the last 100 years, perhaps nothing about daily life has changed more than the commute.

Half of all families lived on farms in 1915, which means work was typically a walk away.

One thing that wasn’t peaking was cars. There were just 2 million cars on the sparse roads of 1915, or about one for every 50 people. The Model T was a hot commodity, but outside of a handful of cities, there weren’t many places you could easily drive it. Today, after several decades of car-friendly policies and public construction, there are more than 255 million registered vehicles in the United States. The number of vehicles has grown by 100 times in 100 years, conveniently for memory’s sake.

America danced to phonographs in blue serge suits and long skirts.

Globalization has dramatically brought down the cost of clothing in the last few decades. But before the United States exported its textiles to Asia and Mexico, Americans paid handsomely for handsome American apparel. Now just 3 percent of a typical consumer’s budget, clothing demanded 13 percent of one’s income in 1915.

Even those sick with nostalgia for debonair hats and gloves must acknowledge that the era’s style was monotonous. Men uniformly wore blue serge suits at work. Women wore skirts whose length varied, according to the fashion and the amount of material available for apparel manufacturers (since some was conserved for the war).

There were all sorts of tech amenities that might seem quotidian today that were rarities in 1915. Thirty percent of the country had a telephone. Less than 20 percent had a stove. Very few people owned a refrigerator, and almost nobody owned a radio. Within 60 years, clothes washers, dryers, air-conditioning, and television sets would all be household staples, but in 1915 they were nowhere to be seen. Instead, the most popular media product of the time might have been the player pianos or the phonograph.








https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Debate_(astronomy)

Great Debate (astronomy)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Great Debate, also called the Shapley–Curtis Debate, was held on 26 April 1920 at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis. It concerned the nature of so-called spiral nebulae and the size of the universe; Shapley believed that distant nebulae were relatively small and lay within the outskirts of Earth's home galaxy, while Curtis held that they were in fact independent galaxies, implying that they were exceedingly large and distant.

The two scientists first presented independent technical papers about "The Scale of the Universe" during the day and then took part in a joint discussion that evening. Much of the lore of the Great Debate grew out of two papers published by Shapley and by Curtis in the May 1921 issue of the Bulletin of the National Research Council. The published papers each included counter arguments to the position advocated by the other scientist at the 1920 meeting.

In the aftermath of the public debate, scientists have been able to verify individual pieces of evidence from both astronomers, but on the main point of the existence of other galaxies, Curtis has been proven correct.

After the debate

It later became apparent that van Maanen's observations were incorrect—one can not actually see the Pinwheel Galaxy rotate during a human lifespan.

Due to the work of Edwin Hubble, it is now known that the Milky Way is only one of as many as an estimated 200 billion (2×1011) to 2 trillion (2×1012) or more galaxies proving Curtis the more accurate party in the debate. Also, astronomers generally accept that the nova Shapley referred to in his arguments was in fact a supernova, which does indeed temporarily outshine the combined output of an entire galaxy. On other points, the results were mixed (the actual size of the Milky Way is in between the sizes proposed by Shapley and Curtis), or in favor of Shapley (Curtis' galaxy was centered on the Sun, while Shapley correctly placed the Sun in the outer regions of the galaxy).








http://www.vancouversun.com/news/metro/this+history+december+1924/9333669/story.html

Vancouver Sun

This day in history: December 30, 1924

TIFFANY CRAWFORD, VANCOUVER SUN 12.30.2013

Eighty-nine years ago, American astronomer Edwin Hubble shattered mankind's understanding of the universe when he announced there are other galaxies in the cosmos. It was one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century.

Using the 100-inch Hooker Telescope, the most powerful telescope of its time, at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles, Hubble peered deeper into the universe than anyone had before, and revealed the Andromeda Nebula contained a galaxy and not just nebulae.

On Dec. 30, 1924, Hubble published his observations, which would be reviewed at a meeting three days later of the American Astronomical Society.

He staggered scientists and crushed conventional wisdom that the Milky Way was the boundary of the universe.








https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2011/may/HQ_11-139_Dawn_Image.html

NASA official

May 11, 2011

RELEASE : 11-139

NASA Dawn Spacecraft Captures First Image Of Nearing Asteroid

WASHINGTON -- NASA's Dawn spacecraft has obtained its first image of the giant asteroid Vesta





http://hvom.blogspot.com/2018/09/tune-in-next-time-for-another-thrilling.html

Posted by Kerry Burgess at 1:56 PM

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2018

Tune in next time for another thrilling installment of: And That Explains That.

excerpt ends Posted by Kerry Burgess at 1:56 PM TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2018








https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap960217.html

NASA

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

Explanation: No person in history has had greater impact in determining the extent of our universe than Edwin Hubble. From proving that other galaxies existed to proving that galaxies move apart from one another, Hubble's work defined our place in the cosmos. Hubble lived from 1889 to 1953 and is shown above posing with the 48-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain and his famous pipe. In memory of his great work, the Orbiting Space Telescope was named after him. Today a great controversy rages on the rate of the universe's expansion, parameterized by a quantity known as Hubble's constant.








https://apod.nasa.gov/debate/1920/cs_why.html

NASA

Why the `Great Debate' Was Important

Although the `Great Debate' is important to different people for different reasons, it is a clear example of humanity once again striving to find its place within the cosmic order. In the debate, Shapley and Curtis truly argued over the ``Scale of the Universe," as the debate's title suggests. Curtis argued that the Universe is composed of many galaxies like our own, which had been identified by astronomers of his time as ``spiral nebulae". Shapley argued that these ``spiral nebulae" were just nearby gas clouds, and that the Universe was composed of only one big Galaxy. In Shapley's model, our Sun was far from the center of this Great Universe/Galaxy. In contrast, Curtis placed our Sun near the center of our relatively small Galaxy. Although the fine points of the debate were more numerous and more complicated, each scientist disagreed with the other on these crucial points.

A partial resolution of the debate came in the mid-1920's. Using the 100 inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson, then the largest telescope in the world, astronomer Edwin Hubble identified Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) . These stars allowed Hubble to show that the distance to M31 was greater than even Shapley's proposed extent of our Milky Way galaxy. Therefore M31 was a galaxy much like our own. In the 1930s, the further discovery of interstellar absorption combined with an increased understanding of the distances and distribution of globular clusters ultimately led to the acceptance that the size of our Milky Way Galaxy had indeed been seriously underestimated and that the Sun was not close to the center. Therefore, Shapley was proved more correct about the size of our Galaxy and the Sun's location in it, but Curtis was proved correct that our Universe was composed of many more galaxies, and that ``spiral nebulae" were indeed galaxies just like our own.

Another reason the `Great Debate' is important is captured nicely in the book Shu, F., 1982, The Physical Universe, An Introduction to Astronomy, (University Science Books, Mill Valley, California) p. 286: "The Shapley-Curtis debate makes interesting reading even today. It is important, not only as a historical document, but also as a glimpse into the reasoning processes of eminent scientists engaged in a great controversy for which the evidence on both sides is fragmentary and partly faulty. This debate illustrates forcefully how tricky it is to pick one's way through the treacherous ground that characterizes research at the frontiers of science."








1980 film "The Final Countdown" DVD video:

US Navy chief petty officer: It's a code.

US Navy commander Dan Thurman - USS Nimitz CVN 68 executive officer: Can you break it, Chief?

CPO: I think someone's putting us on.

Dan Thurman: Why?

CPO: Because I learned this code at Great Lakes. It's ancient!








From 4/26/1920 ( in astronomy the so-called Great Debate ) To 11/10/1967 ( premiere US TV series episode "Star Trek"::"Metamorphosis" ) is 17364 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 5/18/2013 is 17364 days



From 7/24/2006 ( referenced in text below here ) To 5/18/2013 is 2490 days

2490 = 1245 + 1245

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 3/31/1969 ( Kurt Vonnegut "Slaughterhouse-Five" ) is 1245 days



From 10/28/1994 ( premiere US film "Stargate" ) To 5/18/2013 is 6777 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 5/23/1984 ( premiere US film "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" ) is 6777 days



From 8/24/1962 ( John Kennedy - Executive Order 11046 - Authorizing Award of the Bronze Star Medal ) To 5/18/2013 is 18530 days

18530 = 9265 + 9265

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 3/16/1991 ( my first successful major test of my ultraspace matter transportation device as Kerry Wayne Burgess the successful Ph.D. graduate ) is 9265 days



From 4/18/1988 ( as Kerry Burgess with my personal commended participation aboard the USS Wainwright CG-28 the United States Navy Operation Praying Mantis ) To 5/18/2013 is 9161 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/2/1990 ( premiere US TV series episode "Hallmark Hall of Fame"::"Decoration Day" ) is 9161 days



From 3/8/1988 ( as Kerry Burgess my official United States Navy documents includes: Terrier MK 152 Guided-missiles Fire Control Computer Complex Operator ) To 5/18/2013 is 9202 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 1/12/1991 ( the United States Congress authorized the use of force in the Persian Gulf ) is 9202 days



From 1/12/1989 ( Ronald Reagan - Proclamation 5933 America Loves Its Kids Month 1989 ) To 5/18/2013 is 8892 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 3/8/1990 ( as Kerry Burgess my official United States Navy documents includes: "Armed Forces Identification Card" illustrated in previous posts ) is 8892 days



From 11/4/1986 ( as Kerry Burgess my official United States Navy documents includes: Date Completed - United States Navy Fire Control Technician Class "A", (A-113-0019), Service School Command, Naval Training Center, Great Lakes, Illinois ) To 5/18/2013 is 9692 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 5/16/1992 ( the landing of the first flight of the United States space shuttle Endeavour orbiter vehicle mission STS-49 includes me Kerry Wayne Burgess the United States Marine Corps officer and United States STS-49 pilot astronaut and my 1st official United States of America National Aeronautics and Space Administration orbital flight of 4 overall ) is 9692 days



From 11/20/1983 ( premiere US TV movie "The Day After" ) To 5/18/2013 is 10772 days

10772 = 5386 + 5386

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 8/1/1980 ( premiere US film "The Final Countdown" ) is 5386 days



http://nymag.com/news/features/space-travel-2013-5/

New York Magazine

MAY 18, 2013

Welcome to the Real Space Age

By Dan P. Lee

At dawn one morning last November—just as the edge of Earth comprising Florida spun into the field of light bursting from roughly 93 million miles away—she emerged one last time from the monstrous doors of the Vehicle Assembly Building, twelve stories long but dwarfed. This was what had been billed as the “final mission” of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, a 9.8-mile journey to her final resting place at the Kennedy Space Center’s visitors’ complex. That Atlantis’s journey would begin at the VAB—525 feet tall, the largest single-story structure in the world, having sprouted a half-century ago in the frenzy of the space race, as stupendous an achievement as each of the space-faring rockets that would be assembled inside it—multiplied the emotion.

Very far away, still sheathed in its massive launch-apparatus exoskeleton, one could make out Launchpad 39A, site of the historic Apollo 11 moonwalking blastoff, where Atlantis had also taken off to orbit the Earth, once more and finally, in 2011, marking the last in NASA’s 30-year-old shuttle program. The other surviving orbiters, Discovery and Endeavor, had already completed their extraordinary processionals to museums in northern Virginia and Los Angeles (the latter requiring hundreds of trees cut and roadways reconfigured to accommodate its size). A throng of personnel was on hand, those who had built and maintained and flown her, including some of the 7,000 whose jobs were ending with the program. With signs and T-shirts that read WE LOVE YOU ATLANTIS and THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES and WE MADE HISTORY, they fell in behind her. Many wiped away tears as she crept along at two miles an hour, past the dense, still swampland that had, many times before, exploded along with her, the alligators and pigs and birds flushing at her ignition, the fish heaving themselves from the water, the light from the trail of fire flashing from their scales.

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Now the procession was funereal. For NASA’s public-relations machine, desperate to engage Americans’ notoriously fickle interest, it would amount to an odd victory: Stories about Atlantis’s retirement appeared in media outlets across the globe, all written as obituaries. The events of the following evening were equally bleak: A formal dinner at the nearby Radisson commemorating the mission of Apollo 17, whose lunar module had closed its hatch 40 years earlier and ferried the last man back from the moon. In attendance were ten surviving Apollo astronauts, an extraordinary group to say the least, the only men to have traveled to the moon, now gray-haired or bald. Their fears for the nation’s space future were well aired; many of them—including the famously reticent Neil Armstrong, whose recent death had cast a significant pall—had written letters to President Obama saying his space policy portended the nation’s “long downhill slide to mediocrity.” Just as China rushes to land on the moon by the end of this decade, the astronauts noted ruefully, the U.S. is now essentially vehicleless. For a taxpayer-funded fare of almost $71 million per seat, American astronauts are now taxied to the International Space Station by their former archenemies, the Russians, aboard the old, reliable Soyuz rockets against which NASA once raced. The delivery of cargo is now outsourced to private companies. In a tear-stained column titled “In an Earthbound Era, Heaven Has to Wait,” the Times’s Frank Bruni said that for Americans already “profoundly doubtful” and “shaken,” the shuttle’s end “carries the force of cruel metaphor, coming at a time when limits are all we talk about. When we have no stars in our eyes.”

All of which made the scene I’d observed in a desert town in southern New Mexico a week earlier even more exceptional.

In a landscape redolent of Mars, a group of scientists, many of them young NASA astronauts recently decamped to private industry, practically evangelized about this very moment: Unbeknownst to most of the world, after decades of failed Jetsons-esque promises of individual jetpacks for all, people—civilians, you and me, though with a good deal more means—are finally about to ascend to the heavens. If the twentieth-century space race was about the might of the American government, the emerging 21st-century space age is about something perhaps even more powerful—the might of money. The necessary technology has converged in the hands of a particularly boyish group of billionaires whose Right Stuff is less hard-boiled test-pilot, more high-tech entrepreneuring wunderkind—and whose individual financial means eclipse those of most nations. A massive industry is coalescing around them. Towns and states and even some countries are fighting one another for a piece of it. In New Mexico, workers are putting the finishing touches on the first of at least ten spaceports currently under construction around the world. More than 800 people have paid as much as $200,000 apiece to reserve seats on commercial flights into space, some of which are expected to launch, at long last, within a year. Space-travel agents are being trained; space suits are being designed for sex appeal as much as for utility; the founder of the Budget hotel chain is developing pods for short- and long-term stays in Earth’s orbit and beyond. Over beers one night, a former high-ranking NASA official, now employed by Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin transportation conglomerate, put it plainly: “We happen to be alive at the moment when humanity starts leaving the planet.”


An illustration from Virgin Galactic of what customers can expect in zero gravity.Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic
At the New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum in the town of Las Cruces, exhibitors were gathered in booths and behind tables, hawking propulsion technology and ballistics and aerospace engineering specialties of all sorts, offering schwag of stress-ball planets, literature, and DVDs with stars or spaceships or contrails as cover art. Standing conspicuously in the middle of the room was a life-size fiberglass spacefaring vessel called the Lynx, developed by a small California company called XCOR Aerospace. Dr. Lee Valentine, a primary investor, insisted I climb inside.

This was the International Symposium for Personal and Commerical Spaceflight. It had been co-founded eight years earlier by a New Mexico State professor named Pat Hynes, who had been studying and advocating for the commercial potential of space for twenty years. She has watched the conference grow in size and influence alongside the industry. Now, the facility buzzed with engineers and scientists and entrepreneurs and astronauts. Sponsors included Lockheed Martin and Boeing, a European company touting its ability to “launch any payload to any orbit at anytime,” and another company claiming the authority to sell plots of land on the moon. Hynes, ecstatic, inaugurated the conference by shouting a “Let’s rock this house!” welcome, before introducing Michael Lopez-Alegria, a recently retired space-shuttle astronaut who spoke of his conversion from “skeptic with outright disdain for the idea of commercial space” to a “Kool-Aid-pouring believer” in the private space industry.

The overall feeling was the kind emitted by a group of people who know things others do not, or at least not yet, which was reinforced by several current events. Three days earlier, in one of the most elaborate marketing stunts in history, 43-year-old Austrian Felix Baumgartner had ridden, on behalf of Red Bull, a capsule tethered to a helium balloon to a height of 127,852 feet, perched himself, and fallen, breaking the sound barrier and dropping 844 miles per hour until he landed safely in the scrubland two hours east of here. More significant, a capsule owned by the company SpaceX was careering 250 miles above us, in rendezvous with the International Space Station, on behalf of NASA, marking the first transport of cargo to the station by a private company.

There are at least ten companies seriously engaged in commercial space transport. SpaceX, created by billionaire PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, has emerged as the early leader in the three-way race sponsored by the U.S. government to develop a long-term system to replace the shuttle, to handle NASA flights to Earth’s orbit. (Its competitors include two established aerospace companies, Boeing and Sierra Nevada.) Others, like XCOR and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, are focusing on suborbital space, which is easier and less expensive to reach and, for the near future, more accommodating to tourists. One company, Space Adventures, already facilitates tourist flights—starting at $22 million—with the Russians to the International Space Station. Budget Suites founder Robert Bigelow’s company, Bigelow Aerospace, is planning to build space stations of its own. Perhaps the most ambitious (and secretive) company is Blue Origin, founded by ­Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, which is designing several vehicles, including a vertically launching and landing craft, meant to take people into orbital Earth and beyond.

All of this is taking place with the full encouragement of NASA, which has repositioned itself as something of a midwife to the nascent industry. At ISPCS, Lori Garver, the agency’s deputy administrator, shared her hope that one day she could “sit in the back anonymously [in] the natural progression of the industry taking more and more of this capability on itself.” During a break from government work in 2001, Garver had attempted to raise $20 million to buy a seat aboard the Soyuz rocket to the space station, enrolling in training in Star City, Russia, and launching the “AstroMom” project to solicit corporate sponsorship. (The singer Lance Bass knocked her out of contention, though he failed to raise the $20 million and ended up not flying.) She spoke of the free market with Randian fervor, and cited the Renaissance, Da Vinci, and Michelangelo; the Wright brothers, Samuel Langley, and Glenn Curtiss; Steve Jobs and Bill Gates; “Bezos and Musk.” She said she was “so proud that NASA can play a small role” and thanked us in the audience “for creating a space-faring civilization.”

The perestroika of space was on display elsewhere. Army brigadier general Gwen Bingham of the nearby White Sands Missile Range—one of the country’s largest military installations, the birthplace of American rocketry, the clandestine setting of the first successful detonation of an atomic weapon—cued up an extended commercial featuring dramatic music and imagery of missiles, bombs, and rockets, as a voice-over ticked off the base’s “runways!”; “urban environment simulation!”; “environmental test chambers!”; “unmanned systems!”; “material testing!”; “meteorological effects!” She bragged that her base enjoys the only nuclear-effects facility within the Defense Department, perfect for “the various testing of your space portfolio.” Behind her the screen read WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE—WE’RE MORE THAN JUST MISSILES.

Now I was seated inside the cockpit of XCOR’s Lynx mock-up. (The real one was under construction in California and is scheduled to begin test flights in the second half of this year.) The instrumentation on the dash was fake, like the electronics in a room display at Ikea, and inside the plane smelled like an ­amusement-park ride. Valentine, chairman of the board of the Space Studies Institute, touted the Lynx as “one piece, gas and go,” carrying one pilot and one passenger in the cockpit, taking off and landing horizontally from a runway as frequently as four times a day. It was designed as a hybrid rocket and plane.

“This is the real astronaut experience,” Valentine said proudly. To date, 220 people have put down deposits for XCOR’s $95,000 ride, and Valentine talked me through the experience these customers can anticipate as soon as next year. There will be NASA-style g-force training and a NASA-style pressure suit. More than anything, there will be the view—a view that had eluded mankind until just 50 years ago, and one that only a few hundred people have seen in person: Earth. Space. And Valentine wanted me to know that his company’s would offer the superior opportunity. “This is a wraparound cockpit, with fifteen or twenty times the viewing area the Virgin folks get,” he said.

The flight itself will comprise a half-hour. The Lynx will take off with tremendous power, becoming supersonic a minute after ignition, reaching 190,000 feet within the next three minutes. Following engine burnout, its momentum will continue its acceleration through Mach 2 and Mach 3 and, finally, above 62 miles, the Karman Line, the somewhat arbitrary delineation of space, above which an aircraft must travel faster than Earth’s orbital velocity to generate enough lift to stay aloft. There, thinning atmospheric gasses diffuse blue wavelengths of light, creating a cobalt halo above the planet’s edge. It will hang momentarily before beginning its 25-minute glide back to Earth.

“It’ll be a helluva ride,” Valentine said.

Before Musk and Bezos and the ­others, there was Sir Richard Branson: white-blond-haired and ruddy, a first-­generation billionaire, the entrepreneur-adventurer son of a lawyer and a flight attendant who’d parlayed a mail-order record business into a music label into a transportation conglomerate and mobile-phone company, and who, in 1999, based on a lifelong love of space, parlayed all that into the beginnings of the world’s first spaceline, Virgin Galactic. Branson says that his motivation for starting Virgin Galactic was “frustration”—personal, and on behalf of mankind. “Only a few people had been to space, and the government was not interested in you or I going,” he told me recently. Though he also admitted to other interests: “I’m in the airline business. I want to see our rivals’ face as we pass them in the air many, many times the speed of their planes.”

Getting there has proved difficult. First there was the issue of a spacecraft. On October 4, 2004, on the 47th anniversary of the Sputnik’s launch, a spacecraft financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen completed its second successful test flight to suborbital space in a span of two weeks and won the Ansari X Prize (the $10 million competition modeled after contests that had spurred Charles Lindbergh’s first solo flight across the Atlantic). Amid tremendous hoopla, Branson signed an agreement to make the vehicle Virgin Galactic’s spaceline. Flights were said to be imminent. They were not. In 2007, a rocket motor exploded during testing, killing three people. There were more delays. The public lost interest, and a pessimism took hold, a sense that commercial space travel would remain an Icarus-like farce. “There have been plenty of skeptics out there,” Branson said. “But we’ve got to a place now where there’s no going back.”

Virgin Galactic’s CEO is a 39-year-old American named George Whitesides, who I met one evening after ISPCS. The son of a legendary chemist, he is himself a nonscientist who decided to devote his life to space one night in Tunisia, while studying women’s rights in the Islamic world on a Fulbright scholarship, when he found himself walking on the shore of the Mediterranean beneath an impossibly starry sky. He’s worked for Virgin for three years—recruited by Branson from NASA, where he served as the administrator’s chief of staff—but has been a customer for almost a decade: He and his wife, self-described “space geeks,” were among the first to set down a combined $400,000 for Virgin’s then-rather-speculative flights. It was meant, even at the time, to be a delayed honeymoon. So how close were they now, I asked as we sat in the lobby of a hotel in Las Cruces?

“We’re so close I can taste it,” he said.

I asked if he could say categorically that flights would commence within five years.

“Five years?” he said incredulously. “You bet your ass!”

Whitesides pointed to the company’s waiting list of over 500 future passengers. While Virgin Galactic is mostly funded by the privately owned Virgin Group, each of these customers has paid at least a $20,000 deposit, and more than half have written a check for the full $200,000, thus ensuring they remain at the front of the queue. He said Branson is “putting his money and his body where his mouth is. He’s putting, almost more importantly, the bodies of his children where his mouth is.” (Branson has announced that the entire family, save his wife—including potentially his 88-year-old mother—is slated to fly together.) Whitesides predicted that within the next few months, Virgin Galactic would install the rocket into its most recent iteration of the spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, and fire it. “With ­SpaceShipOne, it took three flights before it went into space,” he said. “We’ll probably have five or six, but pretty quickly we’ll get to space altitude. And so the start of powered flight means that we are not far from spaceflight.”

Two days later, I was driven across the beautiful, inhospitable desert of southern New Mexico to see for myself where these flights to space will begin: Spaceport America. The spaceport is only 50 miles from Las Cruces, but the road off Interstate 25 still wasn’t paved, and so the drive took two hours. Finally, it appeared in the distance, rising almost imperceptibly from the scorched brown sands. It looked futuristic but also prehistoric, as if a giant UFO had crash-landed here thousands of years earlier or burrowed underground like the alien spacecraft in the movie Prometheus.

The spaceport’s roots stretched back a decade, to the day when Bill Richardson showed up at Virgin’s London office and identified himself as the governor of New Mexico, hoping to speak with someone about why his state was would be a perfect home for Virgin Galactic. No one at the office had ever heard of Richardson, or could even place New Mexico on a map. He was handed off to a low-level flack, who pushed him up, and up, and up, until a few weeks later he and Branson were in a helicopter hovering over the grounds on which the spaceport now stood.

Richardson told me he was motivated by a high-minded, lifelong love of space as well as a practical belief, from his years of watching budget wrangling in Congress, that space exploration would need to be privatized. To him, a spaceport offered jobs and infrastructure and an economic base for southern New Mexico, plus the possibility of driving space science in the state’s universities. When oil and gas revenues led to a budget surplus, he sensed an opportunity. Motivated to beat out other, bigger states with large space infrastructures, he began courting Branson personally. “Everything he touched seemed to be gold—movies, commercial aircraft, space; the brand of Branson attracted me enormously,” Richardson says. He told Branson he could “make this happen” and convinced the state to offer $209 million of financing. He considers the spaceport—where the runway bears his name—one of his highest achievements as governor and says that Arnold Schwarzenegger is still jealous that he landed it.

A lone, elderly security guard took our licenses before waving us in. We drove onto the grounds, then around the rear of the building, where its vastness became fully apparent, an entire glass wall rising six stories, reflecting back the landscape: endless desert, blue sky, clouds swirling in wisps. We cruised down the more-than-two-mile runway. We could see, at the tallest point of the Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space, a bar that will be accessible only to Virgin customers upon their return to Earth. It has been designed, in typical Branson understatement, to be “the most exclusive bar in the galaxy.”

My guide was Carolyn Wincer, 36, the head of travel and tourism for Virgin Galactic, who grew up on a dairy farm in rural New Zealand and, at 20, lucked into a job in London working reservations for Branson’s consortium of high-end rental properties. In the post-9/11 tourism slump, she took a position no one else in the company had wanted, handling reservations for Necker Island, Branson’s private compound in the British Virgin Islands. What was essentially a personal-assistant job morphed into a more substantial career in Branson’s tourism business, and in 2011, she was given the reins to build Virgin Galactic’s marketing and customer infrastructure, settling in Las Cruces.

We went inside for a tour. Virgin has signed a twenty-year, $200 million lease to be the spaceport’s anchor tenant, which has allowed the spaceline to have a strong say in the build-out. The shape of the terminal is basically parabolic, with banks and walls of exterior windows forming arcs to correspond with the structure. The construction was still wrapping up; doors were held open by screwdrivers. Wincer and a colleague were returning the following day to do some cleaning, as the 94 official “space agents” authorized to book Galactic’s flights were flying in from around the world to see the facility. But even in this state, the space was vast and gleaming white. Most impressive was the soaring, 110,000-square-foot hangar, the future home of five SpaceShipTwo rocket planes, which will carry passengers, and two WhiteKnightTwo launch “mother ships,” which will effectively taxi the rocket planes up the first 50,000 feet.

Upstairs is Mission Control, which overlooks the giant runway. There is a room for medical evaluations and another room for suiting up (the space suits will be skintight, with curved helmets shaped like alien heads). There is a special “astronaut elevator,” reserved for ticket holders, who will ride down, say good-bye to their families, and then exit a giant rear door and climb inside their rocket plane for the two-hour trip.

I wondered: Who are these future astronauts? Wincer likens the situation to the old cell phone, “a Motorola brick,” which took ten years to develop, cost nearly $4,000 to buy, required ten hours to recharge, and offered 30 minutes of talk time—and yet “thousands of people put their names on a waiting list to buy one.” Virgin’s customers are similar: early adopters with abundant faith. Some are wealthy and famous, like Russell Brand, Ashton Kutcher, and Victoria Principal; others are mortgaging their houses to afford the trip. There is Wally Funk, a 74-year-old pilot who trained as one of thirteen women during the early Mercury flights but never had the chance to fly. Together, the Virgin ticket-holders are from more than 50 ­countries and range in age from 18 to 83. Some have died waiting (one in a skiing accident); others have pulled out for financial reasons (one was a Bernie Madoff ­victim). People who drop out pay a cancellation penalty.

Wincer is frequently asked if customers can bring children. Several parents have attempted to give flights as sweet-sixteen birthday gifts; one customer, she said, “at the moment is desperate to let her 12-year-old fly.” The FAA had yet to address such questions, and Wincer sees it as a matter of informed consent, of which she thinks a 12-year-old is not capable. Many customers have their own private pilot’s license, and many others are scared of flying or small spaces. She had just read a profile of one client who is terrified of roller coasters: “Jesus,” she said. She imagines there will eventually be two main constituencies: financially secure thirty- and fortysomethings and “retirees who are like, Screw the inheritance.” She predicts the market will expand substantially when people begin seeing “the slightly normal, slightly overweight person go first.”

Virgin Galactic expects its customers to be “of reasonable health.” Some who have applied are badly ill, space being something of a dying wish, and Wincer said these cases will be evaluated individually with input from a medical team. I asked about drug testing and the possibility of someone panicking. They were still working through this, she told me, though they hope the vetting and preflight training will weed out most problems. Still, Wincer is trying to think of everything. She has raised the question, for instance, of where people at the spaceport will smoke. Her colleagues have fought her on this—there can be no smoking anywhere—and she agrees that this is best, but she also knows from her experience in luxury tourism that “no” is not an answer. She anticipates there will be all kinds of personalities, including bored relatives, waiting back at the spaceport while their loved one is in flight, “like, doing coke in the bathroom.” Some have inquired about having sex in space; she has reminded them there will be a crew and four other passengers. (Though, ever accommodating, Virgin Galactic does offer charters and even a discount: six seats for a million dollars.)

We were standing outside now, as Wincer smoked a Marlboro Red. I wondered whether she wanted to go. She recalled a moment when she was a very young child, in the bathtub, and her mother handed her a bubble-bath bottle shaped like the Saturn V rocket. Later that night, her mother pointed to the moon outside. Wincer grew up assuming that visiting space “would never happen for a person like me.” Now she was planning to join other Virgin employees in early test flights.

There was a breeze, and the building looked magnificent. Standing there, it was hard not to think back to when man first tried this, in the first Mercury flights from Cape Canaveral. Legendary NASA flight director Gene Kranz later remembered how shocked he was to arrive on the launchpad, how “stark, awkward, and crude” the spacecraft looked, “a large black-and-white stovepipe atop a simple cradle.” Now, only 50 years later, there was a commercial spaceport with Virgin Galactic as its anchor spaceline, somewhat like what Delta is to La?Guardia or United to Newark Liberty.

“It’s all part of a bigger journey,” Whitesides had told me back at the hotel. In the history of mankind, 531 people have visited space so far. “We have 540 people signed up today,” he said. “We’ll fly those in the first year of operation.” In less than a decade, Virgin will have flown tens of thousands of flights and, in so doing, “fundamentally recast human beings’ relationship with the space frontier.” Within ten years, he foresees so-called point-to-point space travel. There will also be ramifications closer to home; a flight from New York to Tokyo will take 45 minutes. Current plane rides “will be like the buggy,” he said, “like going from New York to London in two weeks.”

He was adamant. “I think it’s really exciting,” he said, banging the table. “And it’s fun as a human who’s only alive for a hundred years, in order of magnitude, to be part of something that will last a million years.”

At 10:39 a.m. on January 16, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia departed from Kennedy Space Center for its 28th mission, the 113th of the shuttle program. There had been, in retrospect, signs, or at least bits of irony. Such as: During a gathering the night before liftoff, a friend’s teenage daughter slipped a piece of paper to Mission Specialist Laurel Clark, which she stuffed in her purse and opened later—a drawing of an angel fallen to Earth. Or, as Rick Husband was talking to his wife in a video feed not long before Columbia was to return home, she watched as the screen froze just as they were about to say good-bye, so that as she sat there, the image of him staring at the camera, in the orbiter spinning high around the world, she repeated that she loved him.

Columbia had been the first of the fleet of shuttles to reach the Earth’s orbit, in 1981, following in the wake of Apollo and the moon race and marking the next generation of human spaceflight. The primary goal of the shuttle program was simple: to create a reusable space vehicle that could transport materials to and from the International Space Station. But the execution ended up far more complex; designed for 100 missions each, over the course of 30 years the five orbiters had flown only 135 missions, with one of them, Challenger’s tenth, in 1986, ending in tragedy 73 seconds after liftoff.

Inside Columbia’s crew compartment, the seven astronauts adjusted to all kinds of space idiosyncrasies and marvels. Mission Specialist Kalpana Chawla related a moment when she watched as the orbiter arced beyond another sunset: “You can still see the Earth’s surface and the dark sky overhead, and I could then see my reflection in the window, and in the retina of my eye, the whole Earth and the sky.” They worked in two shifts, red and blue, their days—“days” was something of a misnomer, since they experienced sixteen sunrises and sunsets in each 24-hour period—scheduled almost down to the minute. They grew flowers, incubated bacteria, tended to rats. They were in constant communication with Mission Control in Houston, which was aware that an estimated 1.67-pound piece of foam had dislodged from the external fuel tank 81.7 seconds into liftoff. The crew was alerted only in passing, in an e-mail that called the occurrence “not even worth mentioning.” The truth is there was nothing that could be done about it anyway. As a senior NASA official had told a colleague, “Don’t you think it would be better for them to have a happy, successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay in orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done, until the air ran out?”

On February 1, they were cleared for reentry. They fired the orbital engines to slow the shuttle from its speed of 17,500 miles per hour and slip out of orbit. They pitched the nose at 40 degrees. Somewhere high above the Pacific Ocean, a breach in a carbon tile on the left wing’s leading edge, just inches across, began to spread. Aboard Columbia, they continued their checklists. In Houston, telemetry began betraying problems; data ceased coming from the left wing. Thirty-eight miles above eastern Texas, traveling at eighteen times the speed of sound, the orbiter pitched, it began spinning, the left wing having folded over or broken away. The nose of the shuttle—the crew capsule—ripped away. It remained intact for roughly 35 seconds. The cabin lights went black; there was just plasma flashing out the windows. Sitting in their seats, the crew must have struggled, at least momentarily; their “subsequent exposure to hypersonic entry conditions,” a report would later find, “was not survivable by any means.” They plunged 60,000 feet, to an estimated altitude of 28 miles. Inside the capsule, the atmospheres mixed, until finally the module opened completely and the thin, freezing, blue-black sky burst in.

The ramifications of the destruction of Columbia were enormous, reaching much further than just the space-shuttle program, which was already living on borrowed time. It forced the turning of a page that many in and around NASA had fought desperately for decades and led, in many ways, directly to the increasing commercialization of space. President George W. Bush responded to the disaster by announcing one of the most sweeping space plans in American history, tying it more explicitly to national security (sending manned missions to the moon, and from there to Mars and beyond, before the Chinese do the same) and incentivizing private industry to expand their role. By 2009, Bush’s program was severely overbudget, underfunded, and behind schedule; Obama canceled most of it, adopting a “flexible path” that rejected a return to the moon and called for an incremental approach to reaching Mars, while maintaining and even accelerating the private industry’s involvement.

Today, Kennedy Space Center is an odd place, not so much changed in aesthetics from the days of Apollo, when, as the author Craig Nelson has written, anyone attending a launch expecting “a Tomorrowland of PeopleMovers and personal jet packs” arrived to find “a scattering of utilitarian 1960s office buildings, generic assembly factories, and sheds made from slabs of concrete topped with corrugated metal, set against an outback of pine, scrub, and palm.” About 8,500 people work there, down from a shuttle-era high of 13,000. But the funeral dirges seemed to have sounded prematurely. In fact, NASA may be emerging from all this leaner, more nimble, and—crucially—more sustainable. The Vehicle Assembly Building is humming with activity, being reconfigured to handle a host of possible commercial crafts coming online, as well as nasa’s Space Launch System—intended to ferry astronauts beyond orbit and into deep space—whose development is said to be running ahead of schedule, with test flights slated for 2017. Assembly of a deep-space capsule, called Orion, is continuing nearby, and launchpads are being retrofitted. (This is to say nothing of nasa’s ongoing unmanned programs—Voyager, the Hubble telescope, the Mars rovers—which many scientists consider to be of vastly greater consequence.) Several new companies have cropped up along the Space Coast, including an outpost of XCOR and a company called Rocket Crafters Inc. There is a sign placed prominently in a KSC field advertising SPACE AVAILABLE.

At the retiring of the Atlantis last fall, I spoke with two middle-aged engineers who were watching the procession next to me. Jack Hoffman had been at Kennedy from 1965 until his retirement in 1996; Mark Wollam had been at NASA since 1988. Like everyone I spoke with, they used the word “bittersweet” to describe their feelings. They said everyone at KSC knew the shuttle program would end soon after the Columbia disaster, a decision they did not necessarily oppose, given how long the shuttles had flown. Still, they were critical of NASA’s recent decisions. “I think what the space program needs, and I’m not sure how they’re going to get it, is a more defined goal that’s publicly supported,” Bill said. “Like the moon landing—the moon landing was the idea.” Mark elaborated: “The thing is,” he said, “if we don’t do something, there will be Chinese astronauts on the moon making colonies. We will be left behind.”

I heard this same refrain the following night, at the 40th anniversary reception for the Apollo 17, where ten members of the moon-landing program sat on a stage and reminisced. Dick Gordon of Apollo 12 described the harrowing experience of the Saturn V rocket being hit by lightning seconds into flight, so that Houston lost a chunk of its electrical data until a novel reboot could be figured out on the fly. Fred Haise of Apollo 13, the ill-fated flight that suffered an explosion en route to the moon, noted that he never felt safe until the capsule had splashed back into one of Earth’s roiling oceans, and “the two chutes are open, and you look out the window, and you knew you were probably going to be okay.” The astronauts mourned the death of Armstrong and paid homage to the three friends they lost on the launchpad in Apollo 1. This was what spaceflight was for them: novel, heroic, dangerous, utterly unpredictable. They were pioneers, part of the most exclusive club in history, and few were supportive of the most recent developments in space exploration, with billionaires building their own space agencies and regular, overweight people whose piloting experience is limited to driving BMWs ponying up to become astronauts.

There is one notable exception: Buzz Aldrin, who followed Armstrong out the hatch of a module with aluminum-foil walls to become the second human being to stand atop this windless, soundless surface, and who has spent the majority of his time back on Earth in the public eye. At the astronaut dinner, Aldrin spoke very little, most memorably asking his young date to stand up, saying, “Isn’t she beautiful?” But he has otherwise been almost ubiquitous. He has co-written eight books, two of them memoirs detailing his alcoholism and depression, and appeared in several television commercials. He was on Dancing With the Stars in 2010. He lives in Los Angeles and socializes with other celebrities; news of his recent divorce from his third wife, Lois, appeared first on TMZ. In January, Aldrin was introduced as a spokesperson for Axe body spray’s new line of products, to be called Apollo, tied to the Axe Apollo Space Academy; the campaign will include a sweepstakes that will take 22 Axe users to space aboard the Lynx, in 2014, launching from an island off the Venezuelan coast.

I visited Aldrin a few weeks after the announcement in his tenth-floor apartment on a high point of Wilshire Boulevard, a place he calls Mission Control. The apartment has floor-to-ceiling windows with sweeping views of Los Angeles, but aside from some large gray couches and a white baby grand piano, it was mostly empty. (He was waiting for Lois, whom he’d sued, to return most of his memorabilia.) When I arrived, Aldrin was in the other room talking loudly on the phone with Mike Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut who’d hovered above the moon in the command module while he and Armstrong made their descent. He greeted me and showed me a picture on his iPhone of his young girlfriend, then we had lunch and talked.

Aldrin, 83, maintains a punishing schedule. He had just returned from a trip to London and was soon to leave for New York and again for Europe. He is involved in all kinds of ventures, but none is as important to him as the conquest of Mars, which he believes must be colonized. His most recent book, Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration, proposes a series of constant cycling orbits around Earth, the moon, and Mars and its moon Phobos. It is a framework rooted in manned spaceflight’s increasing privatization, which he sees as its only viable future.

Indeed, though he has long been dismissed by his peers as an embarrassment, Aldrin’s vision of the future has turned out to be remarkably prescient. He’s been a vocal critic of NASA, which he believes suffers from “monstrous inefficiency” and is averse to contrary thinking. He’s publicly endorsed Obama’s decision to abandon explicit plans to send astronauts to the moon and has long found the obsession with returning there overblown. “I felt that my ideas were not being accepted by a lot of contemporaries who felt that their life was going to the moon, and they wanted to see more attention paid to that,” he told me. “But when it looked like other nations—China—were making serious statements about going to the moon, I didn’t see why we would want to do that in competition with them.”

Unlike many of the Apollo generation, Aldrin sees himself as just a person who happened to have been given a job. And so rather than argue for space’s exceptionalism and exclusivity, he has advocated for others to go—artists, writers, singers. In the eighties, he proposed a sweepstakes to build enthusiasm and help foment the private industry. Later this year, he has a video game coming out, Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager, based on his Mars cycling-orbit ideas. He showed me drawings of the spacecraft he’d designed on his iPad.

He is a man of almost boundless energy who rarely turns down an endorsement opportunity or dinner invitation (we met during Oscars weekend, and he was actively scouring for an after-party to attend). But he does have standards. He declined an endorsement deal for a walking cane that rights itself if dropped—he has no interest in speaking to an audience his age. The Axe deal, by contrast, made so much sense. He believes in XCOR and its Lynx. He wants, desperately, to give more people the experience he has had. Plus, he said, Axe has the exact demographic he was looking for: young people. He imagines a reality show that could generate millions of dollars in revenue to pay the much more significant cost of getting people into orbital flight.

We sat at his kitchen table eating Cobb salads, Aldrin talking in dense paragraphs, his iPhone beeping and ringing relentlessly. One of his two assistants was mapping the route to the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, where he was taking a date to a black-tie event that evening. Sunset was coming, the sky reddening. Out the window, a power plant to the south was emitting streams of steam that broke into clouds; planes took off from LAX like tiny elongated bullets gliding in slow motion over the Pacific. A pale, gibbous moon hung over the city. Going there, he said, was “an event that took place and I was a participant in it and it carries a lot of things over that I can’t escape from, for better or worse, and I might as well make use of it.” But he has moved on. “Now, as I look at the future,” he said, “Mars is not just another destination.” Establishing a permanent settlement there will be “one of the biggest things humans have ever achieved,” many times more significant than his trip. The people who will make that happen, “they’re going to be pioneers, pilgrims.”

In the past three months: SpaceX’s Dragon capsule completed its second successful rendezvous with the International Space Station, ahead of schedule and under budget. ISS commander Chris Hadfield entranced the world beneath him with his music video of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” which he covers while floating against a bank of windows. Jeff Bezos resurrected from the ocean’s depths some of the jettisoned rocketry from the Apollo missions. Obama announced the acceleration of his space policy, with plans to lasso an asteroid, drag it into the moon’s orbit, and send astronauts to explore it within eight years. Dennis Tito, a 72-year-old former NASA engineer who, in 2001, became the first civilian to buy a ride from the Russians to the space station, announced the creation of the Inspiration Mars Foundation, which intends to partner with NASA and private companies to send two explorers on a 501-day mission to fly by Mars in 2018. (His efforts are more philanthropic than commercial: “I’m going to be a lot poorer,” Tito told me. “My grand­children, and a lot of people’s grandchildren, will be a lot richer in spirit.”) And three weeks ago, Virgin Galactic made good on its promise, dropping its rocket engine into its SpaceShipTwo and taking off from the scrub desert of its test facility. At 47,000 feet, the vehicle successfully detached from the mother ship and shot forward. Watching the successful test launch, Branson told me, he was moved to tears. He expects his family’s flight to be imminent: “I think we’ll be up and away by the end of the year.”

Following all of this with glee and wonder from her tiny house in Tucson was 65-year-old Sally Krusing, a thin, fit woman with sandy gray hair and piercing green eyes, who retired from IBM in 2004 after 26 years as a manager in marketing. We met at ISPCS last October, where she was one of the few nontechnical people in attendance. We sat outside in the shade and chatted.

She is divorced, with one daughter, two grandchildren. She grew up in Tampa, and her first job after high school was working as a reservation agent for Eastern Airlines, which she did for four years before going to college. She wrote out reservations longhand, then put them on a conveyor belt to process. Her job at IBM sent her all over the world, which suited her well. She’d lived in Fairbanks, Alaska; Greece; Germany. After retiring, she’d devoted much of her life to traveling. She’s been to every continent. Her favorite trip was to Antarctica; she used a photo of herself from there sitting next to a seal as her Christmas card.

She did not realize until very late in her life how important space had been to her. Growing up in Florida, on clear days she could see the rockets climbing over the state. She’d always loved science fiction, she’d read everything by Asimov, she loved the Dune series. In Alaska, she got her pilot license to fly small planes. She’d watched the northern lights. There is controversy in the scientific community about whether they make any sound but she believes she’d heard them; they “rustle,” she said, they are “like curtains overhead.” She thought, I would love to go up there.

Before she retired, a friend asked what she would do if she could do anything, knowing she would not fail, and Krusing, without thinking, said, “I’d be an astronaut.” Which shocked her. Three years ago, she went on a hiking trip to Kilimanjaro. Sitting around a campfire in Tanzania with friends, she was asked what else was left for her to see. She said, “I’m going to space.” En route to Tanzania, she’d read in the in-flight magazine about Branson’s plans for Virgin Galactic.

She sat on it for a while. Life got in the way. Money was an issue. Then, last year, she read about Spaceport America and drove to see it. That sold her. She called Virgin’s 800 number with questions about safety and timing and her deposit. She was satisfied with the answers. “It’s risky, yeah—so is driving your car across America,” she told me. She went cycling in New Zealand for a month. When she came back she mailed her deposit check for $20,000. Her number is 380. She hopes to raise money for the full $200,000, which would move her up the list, otherwise she estimates she will not fly until 2017 at the earliest. “So if you know of a sugar daddy …” she joked. She plans to use her nest egg, which is $100,000. She has contemplated mortgaging her house, but it would not provide enough money, so she has readjusted her lifestyle.

I asked her why she wanted to do this.

“Cliché answer?” she said. “I mean, why not? It’s the last frontier.”

She’d not yet told her mother or siblings or most of her friends. “They’re going to say I’m crazy, I’m weirder than they thought. But that’s who I am, I’m weird, and there are a lot of weirder things I could be doing.”

I asked if she’d imagined the flight. She said she does so constantly.

What should she expect?

Suited up and helmeted, after three days of g-force and safety training, she and five others will walk out the back of the spaceport via the gateway terminal and into the heat and the light of the New Mexico desert. They will climb into SpaceShipTwo. She will buckle herself upright into her seat, behind the open pilot cabin, where a series of checks and countdowns will finish. The tandem craft will proceed to the Bill Richardson Spaceway and the jet-powered ­WhiteKnightTwo will begin speeding, faster and faster, up and over the Earth.

Over the course of an hour, the spacecraft will climb, steeply, so that she will be pushed back into herself, into her seat. She’ll pass through the clouds of troposphere and stratosphere, until 99 percent of the atmosphere is beneath her. At around 50,000 feet, WhiteKnightTwo will level off, and another countdown will start. At T-minus zero, SpaceShipTwo will disengage and drop. There will be a brief fall, and then a valve will open and send nitrous oxide pouring onto a solid rubber compound, exploding in ignition from SpaceShipTwo’s rear, fire shooting out. The noise will roar, and within 65 seconds the ship’s speed will increase to 2,600 miles per hour, bursting through the sound barrier, the gravitational force growing to three and a half times that on Earth, the vehicle turning at 90 degrees and soaring upward, the blue out the windows darkening, until the motors shut off, silence filling the cabin. At 68 miles above the planet, weightlessness—the state of everlasting free fall—will commence. Krusing will feel her helmet lift slightly from her head, some strands of her hair alighting, tickling her face, as the spaceship turns over and she unbuckles her seat belt and floats over to the windows, the planet moving below her, the clouds and continents and seas rushing away, and in the distance, its halo, its arcing, while further still, the star-pocked blackness, a blackness those who’ve seen liken not to nothingness but to velvet.

I asked her if she was scared.

“Not at all. I mean, if it’s my time to die, it’s my time to die. I’m not afraid.”

She continued: “For me, I get really excited when I think about it. The rest of my life is just my life. It’s not boring, because I enjoy what I do. But there’s no real excitement. This,” she said, “is something to look forward to.”

Five Companies Hoping to Get You Into Space Soon

SpaceShipTwo

Virgin Galactic

Founder: Sir Richard Branson

Start date: 2013

Ticket price: $200,000

The two-hour flight begins with being taxied by the world’s largest composite aircraft up to 50,000 feet. Then, the SS2 rockets higher, reaching suborbital Earth at a maximum velocity of Mach 3.5 before gliding to the ground.

Lynx Mark II

XCOR Aerospace

Founder: Jeff Greason

Start date: Likely 2014

Ticket price: $95,000

The Lynx fits only two passengers—the pilot and a tourist—and flies for slightly more than 30 minutes. It will reach apogee in the flight’s first seven minutes and then glides downward in a circular pattern, landing in the same spot it launched.

Dragon

SpaceX

Founder: Elon Musk

Start date: 2015

Ticket price: Unknown

The Dragon has already made two cargo-loading trips to the International Space Station. SpaceX plans to launch a manned ship in two years, thus expanding the reach of commercial space travel from suborbital to orbital.

New Shepard

Blue Origin

Founders: Jeff Bezos

Start date: 2016-18

Ticket price: Unknown

An extremely secretive company operating from a privately owned spaceport in West Texas, Blue Origin appears to be launching a suborbital vehicle. Last fall, it successfully completed a launchpad- escape test.

Bigelow Aerospace

Founder: Robert Bigelow

Start date: Unknown

Reservation price: Unknown

Having recently landed an $18 million NASA contract to build a pod connecting to the ISS, the company is independently designing its own free-floating pods and studying moon-based commercial facilities.








from my private journal as Kerry Burgess: July 24, 2006

If we could just figure out a better way to travel to orbit without these silly rocket boosters, we would be well on our way to exploring more of the solar system and other solar systems. There has got to be a cheap and safe way to cheat gravity. Sometimes I think I know how to do it, but I just can't remember.








https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/on-it-goes/

The Times Literary Supplement

MARCH 27, 2019

On it goes

Slaughterhouse-Five at fifty, Your personal library, Pub signs

J. C.

Is it really fifty years since Slaughterhouse- Five? Kurt Vonnegut’s best-known novel was published in the US on March 31, 1969, and swiftly became the author’s first big hit.



http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-slaughterhouse.html

The New York Times

March 31, 1969

Books of The Times

At Last, Kurt Vonnegut's Famous Dresden Book

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., an indescribable writer whose seven previous books are like nothing else on earth, was accorded the dubious pleasure of witnessing a 20th-century apocalypse. During World War II, at the age of 23, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned beneath the city of Dresden, "the Florence of the Elbe." He was there on Feb. 13, 1945, when the Allies firebombed Dresden in a massive air attack that killed 130,000 people and destroyed a landmark of no military significance.

Next to being born, getting married and having children, it is probably the most important thing that ever happened to him. And, as he writes in the introduction to "Slaughterhouse-Five," he's been trying to write a book about Dresden ever since. Now, at last, he's finished the "famous Dresden book."

In the same introduction, which should be read aloud to children, cadets and basic trainees, Mr. Vonnegut pronounces his book a failure "because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." He's wrong and he knows it.

Kurt Vonnegut knows all the tricks of the writing game. So he has not even tried to describe the bombing. Instead he has written around it in a highly imaginative, often funny, nearly psychedelic story. The story is sandwiched between an autobiographical introduction and epilogue.

Fact and Fiction Combined

The odd combination of fact and fiction forces a question upon the reader: how did the youth who lived through the Dresden bombing grow up to be the man who wrote this book? One reads "Slaughterhouse-Five" with that question crouched on the brink of one's awareness. I'm not sure if there's an answer, but the question certainly heightens the book's effects.

Here is the story: Billy Pilgrim, "tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola," was born in Ilium, N.Y., the only child of a barber there. After graduating from Ilium High School, he attended night sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before being drafted for military service in World War II. He served with the infantry in Europe, and was taken prisoner by the Germans. He was in Dresden when it was firebombed.

After the war, he went back to Ilium and became a wealthy optometrist married to a huge wife named Valencia. They had two children, a daughter named Barbara who married an optometrist, and a son named Robert who became a Green Beret in Vietnam.

In 1968, Billy was the sole survivor of a plane crash on top of Sugarbush Mountain in Vermont. While he was recovering in the hospital, Valencia was killed in a carbon- monoxide accident. On Feb. 13, 1976, Billy was assassinated by a nut with a high- powered laser gun.

As you can see, there is much absurd violence in this story. But it is always scaled down to the size of Billy Pilgrim's world, which makes it more unbearable and more obligatory for the reader to understand the author's explanation for it. As I said, Mr. Vonnegut knows all the tricks.

Now there are two things I haven't yet told you about Billy Pilgrim, and I'm hesitant to do so, because when I tell you what they are you'll want to put Kurt Vonnegut back in the science-fiction category he's been trying to climb out of, and you'll be wrong.

First, Billy is "unstuck in time" and "has no control over where he is going next." "He is in a constant state of stage fright...because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next."

Story Told Fluidly

This problem of Billy's enables Mr. Vonnegut to tell his story fluidly, jumping forward and backward in time, free from the strictures of chronology. And this problem of Billy's is related to the second thing, which is that Billy says that on his daughter's wedding night he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from the planet Tralfamadore, flown there through a time warp, and exhibited with a movie star named Montana Wildhack.

The Tralfamadorians are two feet high, green, and shaped like plumber's friends, with suctions caps on the ground and little green hands with eyes on their palms at the top of their shafts. They are wise, and they teach Billy Pilgrim many things. They teach him that humans cannot see time, which is really like "a stretch of the rocky Mountains, " with all moments in the past, the present and the future, always existing.

"The Tralfamadorians...can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them." They teach Billy that death is just an unpleasant moment. Because Billy can go back and forth in time, he knew this lesson when he was in Dresden. In 1976, when he was assassinated, Billy Pilgrim was trying to bring this message to the world. He knew he would die, but he did not mind. "Farewell, hello, farewell, hello," he said.

I now, I know (as Kurt Vonnegut used to say when people told him that the Germans attacked first). It sounds crazy. It sounds like a fantastic last-ditch effort to make sense of a lunatic universe. But there is so much more to this book. It is very tough and very funny; it is sad and delightful; and it works. But is also very Vonnegut, which mean you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner.








http://www.tv.com/shows/star-trek/metamorphosis-24923/

tv.com

Star Trek Season 2 Episode 9

Metamorphosis

Aired Nov 10, 1967 on NBC

When their shuttle is diverted to a planetoid, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy encounter Earth's Warp Drive pioneer, Zefram Cochrane, who appears to have survived there alone for 150 years.

AIRED: 11/10/67








https://apod.nasa.gov/debate/1920/cs_real.html

The 'Great Debate': What Really Happened

by Michael A. Hoskin, Editor, Journal for the History of Astronomy

First appeared in J. Hist. Astron., 7, 169-182

Address: M. A. Hoskin, Churchill College, Cambridge, England, CB3 0DS

The meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington on 26 April 1920, at which Harlow Shapley of Mount Wilson and Heber D. Curtis of Lick Observatory both gave talks under the title "The Scale of the Universe", has passed into the literature as "The Great Debate". It is true that the two resulting papers published in the May 1921 Bulletin of the National Research Council contain the best presentations of the opposing arguments in the current controversy over the dimensions of our Galaxy and the status of the 'spiral' nebulae. But these papers, even if read without comment or discussion, would have taken well over two hours to deliver and therefore cannot possibly represent the proceedings at 'The Great Debate', which took place at 8:15 p.m. with a Conversazione timed to follow at 9:30. Nevertheless, most historians persist in treating these published papers as the verbatim record of a dramatic trial of strength, and so have created an historical romance. In what follows we draw on surviving archives to compile a more accurate account of what actually took place.








http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1988-04-19/news/8803100021_1_iranian-vessels-antiship-harpoon

Chicago Tribune

Navy Rises To Occasion In Duel At Sea

April 19, 1988 By David Evans, Chicago Tribune.

WASHINGTON — For the first time in more than 40 years, enemy warships have seriously challenged the U.S. Navy at sea. The Navy won - decisively.

10805004_868663373168659_344101583_n.jpg, Kerry Burgess et.al circa 1986

20161116_131111.jpg, Kerry Burgess circa 1989




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_controlman

Fire controlman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fire controlman (abbreviated as FC) is a United States Navy occupational rating.





http://hvom.blogspot.com/2016/08/fury.html

Posted by Kerry Burgess at 1:50 AM

Monday, August 22, 2016

I specifically chose the Mk152 computer specialization school.

That would have been late October 1986 or very early November 1986, judging now by my official USN documents.

I write about this here now because, well, for one reason, that ship was sunk 14 years ago in the Atlantic by the United States Navy and allied forces.

I was already a 3rd Class Petty Officer (E-4) during United States Navy Fire Controlman Class A School in Great Lakes Illinois.

In that large class there were other Petty Officer's but most were E-3's like I was when I enlisted in the US Navy in 1983 for the Electronics Technician rating.

The FC and ET rating were the only two ratings in the Advanced Electronics Field.

I forget now precise details about the circumstances associated with my graduation from FC-A school but I remember very well that I specifically chose the Mk152 specialization.

The purpose of FC-A was to teach fundamentals of all US Navy ship weapons systems and the FC-C school teaches the US Navy enlisted sailor a specialized occupation.

I vaguely recall that day when I had the opportunity to select the system I wanted to specialize.

I think with some vague recollection that I had the option of selecting before many other sailors in the class simply because I was already a Petty Officer.






https://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=86437

United States Navy

United States of America

Developing the AEGIS Fire Controlman Combat Systems Training Continuum

Story Number: NNS150407-07Release Date: 4/7/2015 3:29:00 PM

By Kimberly M. Lansdale, Center for Surface Combat Systems Public Affairs

Dahlgren, Va. (NNS) -- The AEGIS Training and Readiness Center (ATRC), who manages and operates Fire Controlman (FC) "C" school, recently hosted the FC Combat Systems Strategic Training Ratings Review (CSSTRR) at Vista Point Catering and Conference Center onboard Naval Station Norfolk, March 31 to April 2.

Twenty U.S. Navy commands and four ships, including USS Mahan (DDG 72), USS James E. Williams (DDG 95), USS Truxtun (DDG 103), and USS Leyete Gulf (CG 55), attended to discuss AEGIS FC rating, "A," "C," and Navy Enlisted Classification (NEC) awarding schools, shipboard training, maintenance activity support, and fleet concentration waterfront training. Representatives from fleet and training commands, as well as community mangers from the Navy Personnel Command, attended the review.

The Center for Surface Combat Systems (CSCS) oversees 14 learning sites, including ATRC, and is responsible for combat systems training across the rates of fire controlman, operations specialist, gunner's mate, sonar technician, mineman, interior communications electrician and electronics technician.

ATRC's Senior Instructor Master Chief Fire Controlman Jeffrey Clarke, who coordinated the rating review, says the review was a great platform to discuss the future of AEGIS training.

"The AEGIS FC CSSTRR was an opportunity for all interested stakeholders and those of us with history and experience in the AEGIS community to come together and identify any shortfalls across all aspects of the rating, in order to shape the training, manning, and readiness for future generations of AEGIS technicians," Clarke said.

Capt. Pete Galluch, ATRC commanding officer, says the objectives of the FC CSSTRR were achieved.

"The team conducted a three day in-depth review to lay the ground work for what will become a strategic plan outlining a career continuum for AEGIS Fire Controlman for Navy leadership review and consideration," Galluch said. "The strategy will be a significant move forward towards implementation of ready, relevant training."

The goals of the CSSTRR were to identify what aspects of the AEGIS FC continuum require improvement, look at ways to reduce accession training time, and investigate ways to implement technology in the process.

"The initial focus of the plan will be to increase effectiveness and efficiency of the current rate construct while continuing to examine and develop a long range plan for 2025 and beyond," Galluch explained.

CSCS Detachment West will host the next review, Gunner's Mate rating, at the Fleet Anti-Submarine Warfare Training Center (FLEASWTRACEN) April 28 - 30. It is critical that Senior Weapons Officers and enlisted GM Subject Matter Experts (SME), the Limited Duty Officer (LDO) community, and Senior Surface Warfare Officers attend.

"The reviews CSCS are hosting are not only important to our mission as a training command but to the U.S. Navy's as well," Galluch said.

AEGIS Training and Readiness Center (ATRC) falls under the Center for Surface Combat Systems (CSCS) command. ATRC provides enlisted personnel with the knowledge, ability, and skill to operate and maintain the Aegis Combat System through timely, effective, and integrated training delivered across the Sailors' careers. ATRC also provides officers the knowledge, ability, and skill to operate, employ, and assess the readiness of the Aegis and Ship Self Defense System (SSDS) combat systems aboard surface warships.

In our ever-advancing world, ATRC utilizes a blended learning solution that includes standard classrooms, hands-on labs, simulations, as well as computer-based and interactive courseware training while still maintaining the training mission for the legacy Aegis fleet.








Red Storm Rising (1986) - Tom Clancy

(from internet transcript)

20 – The Dance of the Vampires

The group antiair warfare officer ordered the cruiser's Aegis weapons system into full automatic mode. Tico had been built with this exact situation in mind. Her powerful radar/computer system immediately identified the incoming missiles as hostile and assigned each a priority of destruction. The computer was completely on its own, free to fire on its electronic will at anything diagnosed as a threat.








The Final Countdown (1980)

(from internet transcript)

Senator Chapman: Who the hell are these people?

Laurel: The navy.

Senator Chapman: Yeah, the navy, yeah. But what part of it? I've never seen machines like they got onboard this thing. And where have they been developing aircraft like that? The navy would have to appear before my committee and I've never even heard a whisper about it. Rocket planes and that thing they pulled us out of the sea with.








When I compose notes for my blog, I will sometimes have a rough outline of items that will compose the note. Often the work on one item leads to a great deal of content before I get to the next item from the original sketch of items. In this case, at this point, I had an item that was supposed to remind me of something about the moon, possibly as a new chapter, or notion, of content in this blog post. Earth's moon, Neptune's moon, I've been sitting here for over three hours trying to remember what it was I originally wanted to reference here. So the hell, with it, I still can't remember what it was. So let's hear from Spokane's only Real Astronaut:





https://twitter.com/AstroAnnimal/status/1142847664406401024

Twitter

Anne McClain

Verified account

@AstroAnnimal

10:31 AM - 23 Jun 2019

Demonstrate what we are capable of when we work together. When we unite not out of fear, but out of a common human instinct to go beyond what is known and explore.

20161116_131321.jpg, Kerry Wayne Burgess circa 1975, near Antlers, Oklahoma, with Homer Burgess, Melissa Burgess

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Ronald_Reagan_with_cowboy_hat_12-0071M_edit.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan

1976. At his home at Rancho del Cielo








from my private journal as Kerry Burgess: 9/26/2006 3:06 PM
As I was trying to go to sleep last night, I had a thought that I have a doctorate in computer science from Princeton. I can’t think of any supporting clues that point specifically to that accomplishment though. There is one memory from working in the lockbox at that bank in Charlotte, but I’m not sure what it means. I also wonder about the B.A. and I had thoughts that I studied music as well at Princeton. I do have supporting memories on that. One is that memory I wrote about a while back of when I returned from the Persian Gulf in 1988. I was writing code on my Commodore computer to randomly produce what I called classical music.








http://www.chakoteya.net/movies/movie1.html

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

(from internet transcript)

KIRK: Radio?








https://www.surfertoday.com/surfing/the-woman-who-coined-the-expression-surfing-the-internet

Surfer Today

The woman who coined the expression "Surfing the Internet"

Surfing is a water sport but, in its initial decades, the digital world thought the outdoor activity could also be an excellent way to address a common habit.

Apparently, the expression "surfing the internet" was introduced by a librarian and, yes, riding waves was an inspiration for the iconic term.

Meet Jean Armour Polly. In March 1992, internet was still a very primitive "activity," but the Master in Library Science had already published an article called "Surfing the Internet" in the University of Minnesota Wilson Library Bulletin.

"In casting about for a title for the article, I weighed many possible metaphors. I wanted something that expressed the fun I had using the internet, as well as hit on the skill, and yes, endurance necessary to use it well."

"I also needed something that would evoke a sense of randomness, chaos, and even danger. I wanted something fishy, net-like, nautical," Jean Polly once wrote.

"At that time I was using a mouse pad from the Apple Library in Cupertino, California, famous for inventing and appropriating pithy sayings and printing them on sportswear and mouse pads (e.g., "A month in the Lab can save you an hour in the Library")."

"The one I had pictured a surfer on a big wave. 'Information Surfer' it said. 'Eureka,' I said, and had my metaphor."

For absurd reasons, the 12,000 copies of the Wilson Library Bulletin were destroyed. Only a few issues were spared, so Jean decided to upload her article on NYSERNet's FTP space. In 14 hours, her work had over 500 downloads.

A few months later, in March 1993, unaware of Jean's article, Tom Mandel of the former Stanford Research Institute (SRI) wrote an executive overview of the internet called "Surfing the Wild Internet."

Meanwhile, Jean's article has been updated and distributed via Project Gutenberg. You can actually read the original text online. It features one of the first free internet guides but, like Jean Armour Polly once said, "I'll never get rich from 'surfing'."

In 2001, Jean Polly wrote "The Internet Kids & Family Yellow Pages," a guide to safely search the internet. She can still be reached via her official website at netmom.com.








posted by Kerry Burgess - H.V.O.M at 7:42 AM Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Pink Floyd

I’m not sure precisely what was my relationship with the band Pink Floyd. I have theories, but I have conflicting thoughts about the nature of my work with that band. One theory is that I wrote and composed all the music while the people known as Pink Floyd were actors I hired to perform the music in live concerts and to generally promote my work. But I am not sure. But yet, I feel there is something there that I can almost remember.

I sense connections to other bands, such as The Doors, which I have already described, as well as to Depeche Mode. I wonder a lot about Depeche Mode because of the CD’s I remember listening to during my artificial life. Why would I “remember” any of that? I "remember" that I listened to a dual-set of CD's from The Doors - "The Best Of The Doors" - as well as two CD's from Depeche Mode. I listened to those CD's over and over. Most nights, as I "remember" it, I sat there in my computer room playing a game on my Commodore computer named "Wasteland" while those CD's were playing.

In my artificial “memories,” I got out of the Navy in 1990 and moved to Greenville, South Carolina, where I got a job providing electronic and mechanical support to Automated Teller Machines for a bank named First Federal.








https://hvom.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-stand.html

Posted by Kerry Burgess at 10:56 PM

Number 878: The Farthest Man From Home

Saturday, June 29, 2019

But here today in the present, with each passing day, I have a constantly growing sense of certainty those ARE NOT my personal memories.

Rather, SOMEHOW, Thomas Reagan, that super-genius I have theorized of here for most the past 15 years, he SOMEHOW convinced me at some point relatively recently that his experiences were my experiences in the 1990s.

He was living the life of Regular Kerry Burgess, I have theorized, and he somehow used his medical super-powers to overwrite my conscious memory and convince my mind with a fantasy he concocted and cajoled my mind into believing.

[ excerpt ends Posted by Kerry Burgess at 10:56 PM Saturday, June 29, 2019 ]








From 4/18/1962 ( the first underground ballistic missile base in the United States became operational ) To 6/5/1987 ( as Kerry Burgess my official United States Navy documents includes: Earned NEC 1189 - Based on graduation from the Terrier Mk 152 Guided-missiles Fire Control Computer Complex course - Naval Guided Missiles School, Dam Neck, Virginia Beach, Virginia ) is 9179 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/20/1990 is 9179 days



From 4/16/1958 ( Rosalind Franklin dead ) To 6/3/1983 ( premiere US film "WarGames" ) is 9179 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/20/1990 is 9179 days



From 4/5/1967 ( Hermann Joseph Muller deceased ) To 12/20/1990 is 8660 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 7/19/1989 ( the United Airlines Flight 232 crash and the end of Kerry Burgess the natural human being cloned from another human being ) is 8660 days



From 12/9/1906 ( Grace Hopper ) To 1/26/1932 ( William Wrigley Jr dead ) is 9179 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/20/1990 is 9179 days



From 10/12/1962 ( premiere US TV series episode "Route 66"::"Ever Ride the Waves in Oklahoma?" ) To 12/20/1990 is 10296 days

10296 = 5148 + 5148

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/7/1979 ( premiere US film "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" ) is 5148 days



From 7/16/1963 ( THAT Phoebe Cates ) To 9/1/1988 ( Luis Walter Alvarez dead ) is 9179 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/20/1990 is 9179 days



https://timeline.web.cern.ch/events/the-worlds-first-website-and-server-go-live-at-cern

CERN

CERN timelines

The world's first website and server go live at CERN

20 December 1990

By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had defined the Web’s basic concepts, the URL, http and html, and he had written the first browser and server software. Info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first website and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN. The world's first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which centred on information regarding the WWW project. Visitors could learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own webpage, and even an explanation on how to search the Web for information. There are no screenshots of this original page and, in any case, changes were made daily to the information available on the page as the WWW project developed. You may find a later copy (1992) on the World Wide Web Consortium website.

You can see the orginal NeXT computer at the Microcosm exhibit at CERN, still bearing the label, hand-written in red ink: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER DOWN!!"








http://www.computersciencelab.com/ComputerHistory/HistoryPt4.htm

An Illustrated History of Computers

Part 4

John Kopplin

The title of forefather of today's all-electronic digital computers is usually awarded to ENIAC, which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. ENIAC was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1943 and 1945 by two professors, John Mauchly and the 24 year old J. Presper Eckert, who got funding from the war department after promising they could build a machine that would replace all the "computers", meaning the women who were employed calculating the firing tables for the army's artillery guns. The day that Mauchly and Eckert saw the first small piece of ENIAC work, the persons they ran to bring to their lab to show off their progress were some of these female computers (one of whom remarked, "I was astounded that it took all this equipment to multiply 5 by 1000").

ENIAC filled a 20 by 40 foot room, weighed 30 tons, and used more than 18,000 vacuum tubes. Like the Mark I, ENIAC employed paper card readers obtained from IBM (these were a regular product for IBM, as they were a long established part of business accounting machines, IBM's forte). When operating, the ENIAC was silent but you knew it was on as the 18,000 vacuum tubes each generated waste heat like a light bulb and all this heat (174,000 watts of heat) meant that the computer could only be operated in a specially designed room with its own heavy duty air conditioning system. Only the left half of ENIAC is visible in the first picture, the right half was basically a mirror image of what's visible.

Two views of ENIAC: the "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator" (note that it wasn't even given the name of computer since "computers" were people) [U.S. Army photo]

To reprogram the ENIAC you had to rearrange the patch cords that you can observe on the left in the prior photo, and the settings of 3000 switches that you can observe on the right. To program a modern computer, you type out a program with statements like:

Circumference = 3.14 * diameter

To perform this computation on ENIAC you had to rearrange a large number of patch cords and then locate three particular knobs on that vast wall of knobs and set them to 3, 1, and 4.

Reprogramming ENIAC involved a hike [U.S. Army photo]

Once the army agreed to fund ENIAC, Mauchly and Eckert worked around the clock, seven days a week, hoping to complete the machine in time to contribute to the war. Their war-time effort was so intense that most days they ate all 3 meals in the company of the army Captain who was their liaison with their military sponsors. They were allowed a small staff but soon observed that they could hire only the most junior members of the University of Pennsylvania staff because the more experienced faculty members knew that their proposed machine would never work.

One of the most obvious problems was that the design would require 18,000 vacuum tubes to all work simultaneously. Vacuum tubes were so notoriously unreliable that even twenty years later many neighborhood drug stores provided a "tube tester" that allowed homeowners to bring in the vacuum tubes from their television sets and determine which one of the tubes was causing their TV to fail. And television sets only incorporated about 30 vacuum tubes. The device that used the largest number of vacuum tubes was an electronic organ: it incorporated 160 tubes. The idea that 18,000 tubes could function together was considered so unlikely that the dominant vacuum tube supplier of the day, RCA, refused to join the project (but did supply tubes in the interest of "wartime cooperation"). Eckert solved the tube reliability problem through extremely careful circuit design. He was so thorough that before he chose the type of wire cabling he would employ in ENIAC he first ran an experiment where he starved lab rats for a few days and then gave them samples of all the available types of cable to determine which they least liked to eat. Here's a look at a small number of the vacuum tubes in ENIAC:

Even with 18,000 vacuum tubes, ENIAC could only hold 20 numbers at a time. However, thanks to the elimination of moving parts it ran much faster than the Mark I: a multiplication that required 6 seconds on the Mark I could be performed on ENIAC in 2.8 thousandths of a second. ENIAC's basic clock speed was 100,000 cycles per second. Today's home computers employ clock speeds of 1,000,000,000 cycles per second. Built with $500,000 from the U.S. Army, ENIAC's first task was to compute whether or not it was possible to build a hydrogen bomb (the atomic bomb was completed during the war and hence is older than ENIAC). The very first problem run on ENIAC required only 20 seconds and was checked against an answer obtained after forty hours of work with a mechanical calculator. After chewing on half a million punch cards for six weeks, ENIAC did humanity no favor when it declared the hydrogen bomb feasible. This first ENIAC program remains classified even today.

Once ENIAC was finished and proved worthy of the cost of its development, its designers set about to eliminate the obnoxious fact that reprogramming the computer required a physical modification of all the patch cords and switches. It took days to change ENIAC's program. Eckert and Mauchly's next teamed up with the mathematician John von Neumann to design EDVAC, which pioneered the stored program. Because he was the first to publish a description of this new computer, von Neumann is often wrongly credited with the realization that the program (that is, the sequence of computation steps) could be represented electronically just as the data was. But this major breakthrough can be found in Eckert's notes long before he ever started working with von Neumann.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper

Grace Hopper

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia








http://www.tv.com/shows/the-simpsons/the-computer-wore-menace-shoes-9075/trivia/

tv.com

The Simpsons Season 12 Episode 6

The Computer Wore Menace Shoes

Aired Sunday 8:00 PM Dec 03, 2000 on FOX

Quotes

Agnus: Seymour, are you looking at naked ladies?

Seymour Skinner: No, Mother.

Agnus: You sissy!



- posted by Kerry Burgess 4:27 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Sunday 21 July 2019