SpaceX's Starship crashed.  Was that just the other day?   Yes,  but there have also been others. Read this article in Space.com that was published 5 days ago entitled,  Every SpaceX Starship explosion what Elon Musk and his team learned from them .  At the site you can watch them all.   Time magazine explained why another explosion is no big deal .   Well, if you fail, try, try, again.  That apparently is Musk's attitude.   The U.S. space program began ignominiously . In 1955 the U.S. announced plans to put a satellite into orbit, targeted for the International Geophysical Year in 1957-58. But the Soviet Union on 23October1957 placed Sputnik 1 into orbit. Embarrassed, we swiftly tossed together on 6December1957 our first package, called by Nikita Krushhev as a grapefruit, and on live television, we saw the the effort rise 4 feet, fall over and explode.   Our grapefruit landed in bushes near the pad and began transmitting signals.  Dorothy Kilgallen remarked,  Why doesn't s

Four years ago the  Smithsonian Channel  featured Steven Hawking on four space documentaries.  One was  Leaving Earth:  Or, How to Colonize a Planet .  He passed away in 2018 at the age of 76 before the program was completed.  I just watched this episode and it helped me synthesize variant thoughts in my mind about the ultimate fate of Humanity. In 1976 I spent a summer at NASA's Ames Research Center, joining a group of university faculty on Project Orion to  design the first device capable of detecting an extrasolar planet .  At that time, the planets of our solar system were the only ones ever seen.  After meeting Carl Sagan at Ames during that interval to view the first photo sent back by Viking 1, five years later when I was working for the U.S. Senate, I helped him convince the U.S. Congress to gain the initial funding for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Established was annual funding for 12 years, leading to the formation of the SETI Institute in Palo Alto. Sinc

  From  Worldometer  (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):          DAY    USA    WORLD     Brazil      India      South Africa June     9    1093     4732        1185        246       82 July    22     1205     7128        1293      1120      572 Aug    12     1504     6556        1242       835      130 Sept     9     1208      6222       1136      1168       82 Oct     21     1225      6849         571       703       85 Nov    25     2304    12025        620         518      118 Dec     30      3880    14748      1224        299      465 Jan      14     4142    15512       1151        189      712                  Feb      3       4005    14265       1209       107      398           25       2414    10578        1582       119      144 Mar     2        1989     9490        1726        110      194           17        1289     9736        2736       171       74           24          936   10206        3158       277       55           25        1405   10470        2244       249     1