Sweet 16 is out of reach...

Today marks the 15th anniversary of the Mir space station. Over its lifetime, 39 manned spacecraft visited the station (including 9 Shuttle missions), as did 65 unmanned vehicles (mostly Progress cargo vehicles). The station massed 19 tons at launch, and with the addition of various modules and science hardware, the complex grew to over 120 metric tons. Mir served as the test bed for the modular method of constructing a space station, and this experience is being put to use currently in the assembly of the International Space Station.

The old, creaky station is currently losing about 900 meters of altitude daily, largely as the result of increased Solar activity, which has caused the upper layers of the atmosphere to accelerate by about 50% the braking effect on the station's orbit. By early March, Mir will be in a critically low orbit.

There has been no money or other resources available to save the station, and now there is no time.

Happy birthday, Mir. It's been nice knowing you.

Cheers...

End of another era...

Among the esoterica that flashed across the bottom of the CNN screen while I was waiting for Someone In Authority to declare me TB-free this morning at the JSC clinic was the following note:

The last typewriter repair shop in Manhattan has closed its doors after 66 years in business.

What took them so long?

Cheers...

Today's just a day to note the passage of time, apparently...

Today also happens to be the 56th anniversary of the invasion, by U.S. Marines, of Iwo Jima. In 36 days of desperate fighting, there were 25,851 US casualties; of these, 6,825 were killed in action. Virtually all of the 22,000 Japanese troops on the island perished.

The photo above has been described as the most reproduced photograph in the history of photography. I don't know about that, but the image is particular indelible in the mind of anyone who has worn the Marine uniform.

The image shows actually not the first, but the second flag-raising atop Mt. Suribachi. The photographer was Joe Rosenthal, who worked for the Associated Press. Of the six men in the photo (two are "in the back row" and are not very visible), three would die on Iwo Jima soon after the photograph was taken.

It is fashionable, in these enlightened times, to consider all participants in a war equally guilty of moral shortcoming. "War doesn't determine who's right," proclaims the e-mail signature of one of my correspondents, "only who's left." Sentiments such as that would have earned him a knuckle sandwich, at the very least, back in the early 40s.

Then again, being the one "left" is not a bad thing, either. Semper fidelis.

Cheers...