A New Era? -- December 22, 2019

Link here.

Boeing safely landed its crew capsule in the New Mexico desert Sunday after an aborted flight to the International Space Station that could hold up the company’s effort to launch astronauts for NASA next year.

The Starliner descended into the Army’s White Sands Missile Range in the frigid predawn darkness, ending a two-day demo that should have lasted more than a week. A trio of red, white and blue parachutes popped open and airbags also inflated around the spacecraft to ease the impact.

“We pinpoint landed it,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a post-landing briefing. 

Pretty incredible:

Recovery teams cheered as they watched the capsule drift down through the air and make a bull’s-eye landing. The touchdown was broadcast live on NASA TV; infrared cameras painted the descending capsule in a ghostly white.

As the sun rose, close-up views showed the large white and black capsule upright — with hardly any scorch marks from re-entry — next to a U.S. flag waving from a recovery vehicle. The astronauts assigned to the first Starliner crew — two from NASA and one from Boeing — were part of the welcoming committee.

“A beautiful soft landing,” said NASA astronaut Mike Fincke. “Can’t wait to try it out.”

It was the first American-made capsule designed for astronauts to make a ground landing after returning from orbit. NASA’s early crew capsules — Mercury, Gemini and Apollo — all had splashdowns. SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, which made its orbital debut last winter with a test dummy, also aims for the ocean at mission’s end.

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Reflections

From "Pride and Prejudice at Harvard," Mark Helprin, fall issue of Claremont Review of Books, pp. 55 - 61.

An alumnus of Harvard University reflects on his experience at Harvard as well as what Harvard currently "stands for."

Harvard has always taken up masses of real estate in Cambridge, Boston, and elsewhere, from forests, agricultural land in California, astronomical observatories around the world, to Bernard Berenson’s former villa in Florence, hospitals, clinics, a cyclotron, giant swimming pools, and secret gardens.

But mainly it straddles Cambridge like (if I can be permitted an insane simile) a fat, happy, beautiful, snobbish octopus.

You can do a lot with $40 billion, no taxes since 1633, and a river of government and private grants, tuition, and giant bequests. Harvard is as big and varied as Xanadu.

For example, only after almost a decade of living in the middle of it did I discover what appeared to be the terrace, of the faculty dining room, of the cafeteria, of the school of forestry.

Harvard contains Whitmanesque multitudes, and one can describe it only as accurately as the blind men describing an elephant.

[Channeling Henry James:] Though within its vastness I could be in only one place at a time—and spent most of that time with my head down, reading and writing—by chance alone I was present at so many disruptions in the late ’60s and early ’70s that by reasonable extrapolation their real number and frequency were a steady guerrilla warfare: the staple student protests about regulations and living conditions, which by then had been beautifully feathered into broader political themes; jackbooted, leather-clad Panthers marching in cadence through the Yard to the old Gund Hall, where they invaded a lecture on medieval city planning they claimed was in furtherance of black genocide, and forced the professor to abandon it; the attack by helmeted, chain-and-pipe-wielding leftist fascisti on what they thought was the Center for International Affairs but was really the Semitic Museum and its aging female docents (it might have been funny except for the injuries and destruction); Cambridge cited in the Institute for Strategic Studies’s (which later prefixed International to itself) Strategic Survey, 1970, for a violent demonstration (among many) in which, inter alia, on April 16 of that year 300 were injured; trying to sleep despite clouds of tear gas wafting from Harvard Square a third of a mile away; my graduate adviser’s car bombed in the garage adjacent to the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, where he was the director; literally fighting my way past thugs blocking classroom buildings; and so on.

Even in its stronger days, the administration either surrendered, compromised, or did not notice.

I never attended Harvard University but I am one kiss / one handshake away from being an honorary alumnus (in my own mind, LOL) through two other alumnae: a) my first true love, in another life; and, b) a son-in-law, current life.

Good, bad, indifferent, there is no question that Harvard University is an American icon, and I find it incredibly intriguing.

Taxi, Harry Chapin