Tag: john glenn

The McBournie Minute: ‘I see the moon, the moon sees me’

For the most part, space really hasn’t been that exciting in a long time. Sure, there has been some attention paid when a new rover lands on Mars, or there is a tragedy, or we send John Glenn up into orbit again. But really, we just don’t care about space the way we did in the 1950s and 1960s.

That is until recently.

NASA brought us into yet another interstellar war last Friday morning when it bombed the moon. They “claim” it was to see if the debris kicked up by the impact could prove that the moon was, in fact, made of cheese, but the Internet knows better. It always does. That is why we live in the Porn Information Age. The age of citizen journalism. The age when you don’t need any fancy pants “credibility” or “evidence” to support your claims. Bearing this in mind, here is what really happened to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Continue reading The McBournie Minute: ‘I see the moon, the moon sees me’

The McBournie Minute: Finish the space station already

With a space shuttle landing yesterday and the Discovery Channel’s three-part documentary about NASA, When We Left Earth, space has been in the news a lot lately. Of course, space is all about cooperation and brotherly love these days. But for the first 40 years of space flight there was more of an “eff you, we’re going to beat you there” mentality. Perhaps we need to go back to that, if for no other reason than to get things done.

I remember first hearing about the International Space Station when I was in fourth grade, this was 1993 One of my teachers put on the overhead projector a snapshot of how the ISS would look when it was completed. A couple years later, I remember stumbling across it in an encyclopedia, I was probably looking for the definition of “isthmus” or something. There again was a computer-generated model of the huge structure orbiting the Earth. The caption underneath it said it would be completed around the year 2000.

It’s 2008 and the damn thing still is not finished. Continue reading The McBournie Minute: Finish the space station already