The death toll for Category 4 Hurricane Helene is now up to 64 .  Surprisingly enough, South Carolina is up to 23, with Florida at 11, with 10 of them from the Tampa Bay area.  Perry and Tallahassee had none.  Note that the dangerous quadrant is to the northeast ( 0 to 90 degrees ).  These numbers are expected to further rise.  There is particular worry about North Carolina.   4.8 million lost power.   Notice how the eye of Helene has circled back to Tennessee. I read an article by John Crisp on  Live on Mars? How about life on Earth? What should be the priority of NASA?  Send people to the Moon and Mars?  Or minimize mammoth expenses by focusing on telescopic explorations to find life in our solar system and beyond? I once worked on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at the NASA Ames Research Center, and eight years ago Harry Jones, who works there, speculated that the  cost of the first human mission to Mars would be $500 billion . When President G.W. Bush in 2004 announced

  The largest meteor shower of this year is occurring now.  Above is an extraordinary  photo of the Perseid meteor shower on 12August2021 by Josh Drur y ( right ) over Stonehenge.  You also see our Milky Way.  The Perseids, associated with the Swift-Tuttle comet, started Monday morning and will continue for up to five nights.  The best time to watch is near dawn before there is any kind of sunlight.   However, the best night was the first one, partly because of Moon conditions.  From all indications, not worth a bother watching the Perseids anymore this year. These flaming particles burn up by the time they get as close as 50 miles from the Earth's surface. Note that this comet has a 133-year orbit, and what you see is the leftover particles from previous visits. John Denver's song  Rocky Mountain High  makes reference to this shower. Almost all meteor showers are associated with a passing comet or asteroid, and some are named after them.   However, the identification of the ev

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