Category Archives: History

Mike Collins

It was a weird situation, but it wasn’t lonely.

“You put some Samoan on his little canoe out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at night and he doesn’t really know where he’s going, he doesn’t know how to get there. He can see the stars, they’re his only friend out there, and he’s not talking to anybody. That guy is lonely.”

“I didn’t experience that kind of loneliness,” he said. “So I did not have Mission Control yakking at me for a full two-hour orbit — for 40 minutes or so I was over there behind the moon — but I was in my comfortable little home. Columbia was a nice, secure, safe, commodious place. I had hot coffee, I had music if I wanted it, I had nice views out the window.”

“To depict me as in despair or something and so lonely as in, ‘Oh my gosh, I could hardly wait to get back to the human voice coming directly up from Earth,’ yeah, that’s baloney.”

I always thought it was baloney.

The Last Beetle

I disagree that the one that rolled off the line was the last one. I was a VW mechanic as my first job out of high school. As far as I’m concerned, VW hasn’t built a Beetle since 1978. If it doesn’t have a flat-four air-cooled engine with a number 3 cylinder that eats valves and rings due to having its airflow cut off by the oil cooler, it’s not a Beetle, regardless of a vague resemblance of body type.

Lunar Resources

Is there a conflict between science and sustainability?

Meanwhile, there is a symposium on space settlement in DC today. You can follow the livestream.

[Late-afternoon update]

I know this is what you’ve all been waiting for: The Slate article about this crap.

Though most of the symposium was actually useful and interesting, ignoring the nonsense about colonialism in North America.

The Epstein Case

It’s unlike anything Ken White has seen before (which is saying something).

I don’t know whether to be amused or appalled at the degree to which the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) are trying to simultaneously hide all of the Democrat/Clinton connections (including Wikipedia), while trying to pin it on Trump.

[Update a while later]

Was Epstein running honey traps to blackmail the power elite? It seems like the most-likely explanation.