Tag Archives: science

Artemis II

I held off on this. Didn’t want to jinx it. Now that the Artemis II crew is back, safe and sound after a near perfect mission, I can write about the thrill once again of seeing humans reach the moon for the first time in 53 years. With all the divisiveness and strife of today’s world, it is nice, even if just for a moment, to reflect that somethings can still be achieved in the name of all mankind.

I still remember asking my parents for permission to stay home and the watch the flight of the first living thing America sent into space. It was 1961. The passenger inside the Mercury capsule was Ham, a chimpanzee. I was in grade school. Ham paved the route. Alen Shappard followed. Eight years later Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

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RFK, Jr., Hazard to Our Health

Someday someone will produce a study that will try to quantify how many people died as a result of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.‘s war on vaccines, medicine and science. Tens of thousands? Millions? It is hard to predict.

Donald Trump, implementing the Project 2025 plan to destroy the federal government, has appointed the worst possible people to run the executive agencies. It is hard to select the most deplorable of the deplorables. But RFK, Jr. is certainly in the top group.

Kennedy is a former heroin addict who as a youth was expelled from two schools, dumped a dead bear in Central Park, has no medical or science degree, and was labeled a “predator” by his own family. He made a career out of being an anti-vaxxer, spreading false information about vaccines. In return for his political support in 2024, Trump named Kennedy Secretary of Health and Human Services. At his own confirmation hearing Kennedy himself stated that Trump had “offered him control of the public health agencies,” including HHS, CDC, FDA, NIH, and USDA.

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Jim Lovell

The world lost one of its greatest space explorers with the passing of James Arthur “Jim” Lovell Jr., who died peacefully on this week at the age of 97. Lovell embodied the spirit of American exploration and the courage to venture into the unknown that defined the golden age of space exploration.

Lovell’s extraordinary career spanned four spaceflights that helped write the early chapters of humans in space. He was among the first three men to leave Earth’s orbit and journey to the moon as command module pilot of Apollo 8 in December 1968, a mission that gave humanity its first close-up view of the lunar surface and the iconic “Earthrise” photograph that forever changed how we see our home planet.

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