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-¦ December 2022 ¦-a n a l y s t █ On April 15, 1726, while taking tea in the garden with his friend, Issac Newton (b.1642) pondered on an apple which had just fallen to the ground. William Stuckeley records how Newton mused: a n g e l █ The ancients, unconcerned of this “drawing power” that Newton was to articulate, mocked the gravity throne and continued sending prayers to heaven. Entreaties written in temple script on paper were then folded into a pouch. A lit candle attached to the pouch sends smoke inside, causing its ascent. █ Humankind then followed the lanterns, yet the earliest ones didn’t know to carry oxygen, and returned spouting the wildest tales of beings living in the upper air. The four winds, curious, would approach with whistles and roars and yells, asking questions, including that confounded new contrivance, a wind tunnel. █ Sensing fear in their visitors’ eyes, the thunderous voices abated. Zephros drew closer and whispered: “We are wind gods of the four cardinal points, heralds of seasons, sons to Typhöeus, fifth and final monster born to mother Earth. We too seek a reason for existence, and whether or not it becomes us to be suited up in turbines, pumps, and such fetters.” █ Notos spread icicles while parting his lips: “Can these regulation systems really help with my restlessness? and what’s up with welded insulation?” Euros brought up the sorest point: “Can gravity weigh me down and curb my mood.” Boreas’ grumble rumbled: “Magnetosphere constrains our empire but why? And who are these rocketmen and their reckless aerial turns in guidance and control?” a i r m a n █ The four winds invariably took their gasping guests on the grand tour. Earth’s atmosphere is spherical and contains a precise mixture of gases such that oxygen becomes its miraculous chemical product. It has the same shape as mother Earth due to her gravitational grit, which she bestows also to water and all living things. The sea and mountains are deemed to be sentient by the ancients, and so too is Aether considered a being, having undergone “biochemical modifications by living organisms” ever since its aboriginal form coalesced into a paleo-atmosphere. Material enough for Earth to lassoo the grandson to Chaos with a girdle tight enough to separate the deity into distinct layers, and is the main cause of clouds. █ This primeval sky god can only be discerned when he digs into his bag of optical tricks and throws mirages, or scatters light. Aether is patron to Earth, whose existence depends on a narrow band of the bottom layer, beginning at sea level. a v a t a r █ Innovative proto-aviators watched how birds populate the air and go where they will. Wings got built and tied to men. Jumps happened. Leonardo da Vinci (b.1452) had his own solution; yet his own design, wings that can flap, never left the sketchbook. █ a e r i a l i s t █ Divinities of the air were entranced to receive paper prayers heaven-bound using paper, glue and heated air. They also found out that hydrogen, when it is unadulterated, possesses levitational abilities also. But being a gas, it would simply dissipate when in contact with one or more gasses. █ Rare and difficult to distill, hydrogen requires a chamber, white-hot iron, running water; and had to wait until a non-porous material to contain the new gas, was was discovered around 1780, had not yet been developed. █ A ginormous pillow, with a small opening, tied to a large basket and fed a healthy gulp of heated air, took to rising into the atmosphere. Then, as the trapped air cools, this “hot-air balloon” will descend. The first companions chosen to carry out this maiden flight were a french sheep, duck and rooster. a c r o b a t █ Smoke from large fires first showed the way during wartime: to send a signal, or initiate a maneuver. Kites were another way to harness wind behavior to send sturdier signals. It can also be used as a measurement of distance, or just to “test the wind.” Kites can also fight each other. a l c h e m i s t █ Through trial and error someone came up with gunpowder. That a right mixture of carbon, sulfur and saltpeter (an efflorescence mineral found on the surface of stones) will produce a flash accompanied by fire that burns off – an explosion. A wrong mixture produces instead just “smoke and flames.” a r c h e t y p e █ When World War 2 was over, pilots and other aeronauticals returned to civilian roles. █ Back to working for a paycheck, these airmen flexed their know-how and birthed an aerospace industry that nowadays has gone global. By 1960 the skies were already beginning to get mighty crowded. 
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e n v o y █ Today’s astronomers worry about micro-meterorites and cosmic rays bombarding the International Space Station, close calls among satellites and spacecrafts, and especially wardrobe malfunctions in outer space. █ e y e w i t n e s s █ The ancients were intrigued by natural glass found in nature, able to let light through, to enhance eyesight by magnification. These qualities were refined, when glass-making was invented, to help address loss of eyesight in the aged, among many other benefits. Polished with a concave or sometimes convex surface, fitted into a holder, this became a magnifying glass. Then someone fitted several lenses into a tube and invented the telescope. e x a m i n e r █ Mary Palmer (b.1839) married a doctor, and amateur astronomer, Henry Draper (b.1837), and became an astute student of the sky. His sudden death age 45 left her with money, paperwork and photographic evidence of their galaxy quest. █ Mary Draper then bequeathed an annual sum, beginning in 1886, to Harvard College Observatory, to procure sufficient staff to finish her husband’s catalog of stars. e t y m o l o g i s t █ NASA’s predecessor had hired female mathematicians, as early as in 1935, as human computers in a segregated system. Assigned to different departments, they would be tasked to take down notes, parse flight test scores, run calculations, perform analytics. █ Jeanette Scissum (b.1938) on her first day, in 1964, at NASA: “Mathematician, entry level. They didn’t have computers or a computer science program at A&M when I graduated, so I didn’t know how to do that. Once I did, everybody had me doing computer stuff for them.” █ Mathematician Katherine Johnson (b.1918), working in NASA’s flight mechanic division, was told that a spacecraft would want to make a landing during prime-time television on a specific date. She then had to figure out when takeoff time must take place. Using analytic geometry, Johnson figured it out. █ High-school whizkid Mary Winston (b.1921), with degrees in mathematics and physical science, worked in the computer pool, and was assigned to assist in wind tunnel tests at twice the speed of sound. Showing promise, she went back to school and got an engineer’s degree and became an aerospace engineer. Married to a sailor in the U.S. Navy, she became Mary W. Jackson. The National Aeronautics Space Administration’s D.C. headquarters is now named after her. █ 
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•❚-❚-❚• In the aftermath of the Trojan War, Olympians carried on the fight with each other – god versus god. This theo=machia so angered Ge (pronunced Gaea), that the premier earth goddess revolted. Egypt disappeared into a “screaming wind”. Another Aesir-Vanir conflict had been brewing when ripples from the war in the south triggered the eighteenth Ragnarok, sending nine worlds and twelve hells toppling into a watery wormhole. •❚-❚-❚• Ge began cramping and vomited out contents in her vaults. The largest ejectiles had been imprisoned there by her grandson Jupiter. These (4th class) monsters, gaining back their agency, promptly attacked Olympus by stacking mountains and climbing up, triggering giganto=machia 2.0. What else that didn’t climb out was shaken off in undulating spasms, clearing out caverns and emptying all of the hells that Ge knew about. The last to depart Tartarus, with the keys, were underworld deities Pluto and his titan-aunt Hekate, making sure every gate was open and all left unguarded. •❚-❚-❚• The goddess with no parents then picked Atlas up and threw the second-gen titan at her male counterpart, which is what gave Uranus his famous red-eye. Their son, first-gen titan Hyperion, witnessed all this and had a hydrogen-heart attack; in 1948, the solar god would step down from the Sun. Taking his place on the gravity=throne was that “container of multitudes”, complex god Apollon, whose outer manifestation now is Helius, “the eldest flame”. 
Eight planets (+ a few minor planets + the Asteroid Belt), i.e., the classical solar system, go around the Sun along the “invariable plane”, in harmonious alignment. Beyond Neptune, though, this predictable “music of the spheres” is no longer the case. +  +  +  •❚-❚-❚• Marooned on a chunk floating south as Pangea broke apart, indigenes clung on and ended up on another shore, under another view of the Sun. Looking at summer skies through wintry eyes, they saw the physical, spiritual and mortal planes clearer and earlier than most. They were the first to notice, when the first atomic bomb test too place on July 17 1945 in New Mexico, how Ge had curled up and succumbed to catatonia. Nowadays, the first peoples of Australia are best friends with the faded goddess of the Earth, and help to repair her bandaging to suit every season. •❚-❚-❚• Nereus actually didn’t fell anything while Ge went through her geo=machia. His aboriginal root matter being H-two-oh, “Mediterranean” soon enough began to splash some of it over the exposed parts of Earth, initiating a tidal rite to soothe his beloved, his grandmother, his only home. •❚-❚-❚• In 1950, Pluto and Hekate presented themselves at the gravity☷throne, and told everyone present what they had seen: a trans-Neptune region of space where there were more rings, where space rocks and objects have zany orbits, and where everything was suspended inside a stupendous gossamer cloud. The king and crone of the underworld had come to the house of the Sun to announce the passing of the old order. •❚-❚-❚• This had already begun during the formation of the inner solar system, when Jupiter had jostled with neighbor Saturn over throne placements. This mini=machia, between father and son, was won by the son. Yet by widening and adjusting their orbits to avoid collision, it also caused nearby Uranus to flip onto his back, all the while making Neptune, near enough, to sway and heave, back and forth. •❚-❚-❚• The premier sea god had immediately countered to save his trident☵throne, but in the ensuing tempest damage happened, and flinging what flaked off into remote regions. Neptune had also smacked into something substantial, shattering the object and hurling debris large and small far, far, far away. Casualties from this oly=machia are now everywhere you look, yet are subject one and all to the gravity☷throne. Thus ended Hekate’s account of the gathering together of a hypothetical heaven. •❚-❚-❚• Pluto, the first minor planet, was recognized as the first trans-Neptune entity, a fitting placement for the king of the dead overseeing a moving cemetery in outer space. The nearest casualties made up a vast legion called the Kuiper Belt, the second ring around the Sun. There is yet a third ring, faintly sketched out, the odd-behaving objects that make up the Scattered Disc. Further out yet is a bubble of cemetery dust, the Öpik-Oort Cloud, composed of multi-billion bits of iced pebbles. All these trans-Neptune objects together make up the “frozen forgots”, some larger some smaller, some spherical with moons, marinating for the most part in blue-grey bruises under dessicated dressings. •❚-❚-❚• Pluto had, beginning 2004, come to understand this new neighborhood. In a golden chariot drawn by four black horses, the infernal god had crossed over the second ring of the Sun and got stuck momentarily in bow shock, the first visitor from the inner solar system to do so. Breaching which hurled Pluto inexonorably through unknown territory before ending up in potentially hazardous interstellar space (1904). The king of shadows had to find a rippling band, caused by the Sun’s rotation, that resembles a “ballerina’s skirt” in motion. Sensing his moment, Pluto drew his sword and acted, cleaving the hydrogen wall and stepping over, arriving at the final barrier of the heliosphere, a gelatinous membrane that causes termination shock – a shield filtering out harmful rays from crossing over. A trans-Neptune object covers all manner of space rocks outside the inner solar system, i.e., beyond Neptune. By this reckoning, Pluto became the first tNo. The region where these objects congregate corresponds roughly the size of the heliosphere (1904). It can be home to minor planets, proto-planets planetesimals; minor moons, moonlets, moonmoons; varieties of comets, etc.  +  +  •❚-❚-❚• Regular ministrations by humankind on Ge was working, and she began to detox, then itched and bloated and accidentally shot great-grandson Mars into outer space. Angered by this rejection, the military god turned around and demolished the nearest planet; the year was 1534. Long before this event took place, daughter to the sea Venus had long departed the wretched Earth to seek safety closer to the Sun. Mars eventually buried all the remains in his back yard, a cemetery now called the Asteroid Belt (1801), and is the first ring around the Sun. •❚-❚-❚• Six years later, corpses began to float into view. The first happened to be spherical, and happened to be smaller than the Moon, when it was later measured. So erroneously it was titled first a planet, then an asteroid, before becoming, in 2006, the first minor planet in the solar system. The largest object in the Asteroid Belt is agricultural goddess Ceres (1801). •❚-❚-❚• Now revived, the sister to Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto – the second female in Pantheon 1.0 – crosses over to the Garden of Apollon 2.0, prepares beds for growing barley, composes hymns to sunlight. Made of ambient matter, having no definite boundary, the Sun is a star with the capacity to shed root matter as energy, in a form rapid enough as to seem solid; the Sun can assume diverse forms. Each sun also undergoes ongoing combustion, has gravitational sway over some surrounding space, its heliosphere: a shapeless bubble, because solar wind plus interstellar wind plus motion in space. •❚-❚-❚• A sizeable space rock with an electro-magnetic field is a planet, and can host one or more satellites. There are also planets engulfed in visible gasses; some have rings. The celestial court now lists the eight closest planets to the house of the Sun as the sole first-gen pantheon. And the oldest seat is the chthon☶throne on Earth. 
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★ With over 50 space programs, mother Earth is getting concerned about losing emigrés to a hypothetical heaven. Already there are six space agencies in the Middle East, and five in Africa. Looks like eight in Central Europe, and around ten in the Americas. Asia has maybe ten, if India, Pakistan, New Zealand and a part of Russia are excluded. South African National Space Agency Since 1841, Cape Town has had a magnetic station. Today it is part of a global network collecting data on Earth’s magnetic field. Early thinking gave “an important role in making the planet habitable” to it. Inside the iron core the metal turns liquid, making out the surface as the least-hot portion of iron’s properties. This skin, as it sheds and cools, crystallizes and will emit rule-driven electro-magnetic arcs. A healthy geo-magnetosphere can impart spherical harmonics to the ionosphere and ocean tides. ❚ ❚ ❚ The Hermanus Magnetic Observatory now lives on university grounds, and is also a part of the country’s space program. Today, the South African National Space Agency is the sole weather-activity center for all of Africa, employing satellite feedback for fires and flooding. |
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New Zealand Space Agency Learning that its remote location was ideal for a launch site — vast stretch of ocean, negligent ship traffic means a misfired rocket does no harm, this island nation slipped into entrepreneurial shoes, donned ministerial gloves, and opened its doors to welcome science, aeronautical engineering, remote communicating and space law. ❚ ❙ ❚ The New Zealand Space Agency keeps track of methane in the atmosphere, and shares its database in a bid to slow global warming. United Arab Emirates Space Agency United Arab Emirates started a space program in 2014. Eight years later this fledgling has landed on Mars, only the second nation after America to do so. ❚ ❚ ❚ The UAE rover was developed in-house, assembled in the United States, took off, inside a Japanese lander, aboard a SpaceX rocket in 2020. |
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International Space Station The era of comfort in zero gravity took place quietly, in 1988, as the first module of the International Space Station flew towards the stratosphere. It was designed to be “an autonomous space habitat for eight months,” waiting for the next component. Zarya was equipped with “container connections for contingency transfer of water, container bags, wipes, filters.” There were six nickel-cadmium batteries, two solar arrays, three docking ports. A pressurized valve unit with air ducts, funnel containment filters, dust collectors, smoke detector, gas analyzer, gas masks, portable fans. A pole, handrails, hooks, instrument containers in the cabin. In 2020, Legacy loos were replaced with new ones. On the drawing boards: a waste management system common to all vehicle platforms. ❚ ❚ Fifteen nations are members to this International Space Station, a potentially expandable habitat, while five coordinate the day-to-day. All have signed agreements covering legal, financial and political implications in how the station is utilized, its traffic routes, crew time. ISS is serviced by a team of three robots, capable of independent or conjoined activities. |
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Italian Space Agency Italy looked at the 19th century sky with scientific eyes. Inventor Luigi Gussali (b.1885) would go on to propose, in 1946, the use of solar rays as a propellant. Engineer Gioulio Gostanzi (b.1875) thought instead it would be nuclear power. He also thought about the plight of weightlessness, lethal rays from the Sun, whose proximity would bring on heat death. ❚ • ❚ Italy joined the space race in 1968 with a satellite launch. Twenty years later, the Italian Space Agency moved next door to the Vatican. |
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China National Space Administration China sent a satellite to space in 1970 for a song. Aboard was a music tape on perpetual loop playing a eulogy to Mao Zedong, broadcasting the sino revolution to outer space. A space program emerged, orbiting around the figurehead of rocketeer Tsien Hsue-Shen aka Qian Xuesen (b.1911), who had returned after being expelled from JPL for political uncertainties. ❚ ★ ❚ By 2007, the China National Space Administration could afford to use a spent satellite for target practise, and created a debris field containing some 30,000 pieces. ❚ ★ ❚ China has now built its own space station. Begun in 2016, the final parts come onboard six years later, which was the plan. But not before an unannounced rocket launch carrying two modules to the build “reentered Earth’s atmosphere and crashed west of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean,” angering everyone. During the build, there have been rotating construction-and-maintenance crews living aboard. ❚ ★ ❚ Engineers in Chengdu have designed Moon 2.0, a fixed a “fixed” illuminated satellite, 22,000 miles (33,400 km) up and fifty miles (80.5 km) wide. In 2022, alien signals were detected. |
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European Space Agency Europe at the end of World War 2 was shell-shocked, there had been a massive brain-drain in every field. Remnants of aeronautic science kept in contact and in 1975 came together to sign on to a “cohesive approach to space.” Established for uncrewed space exploration, the European Space Agency soon enough changed its approach to space science. Initially founded by ten nations, ESA now has twenty-two members, and a waiting list. ❚ e ❚ Missions overlap. Ariel and Cheops are two exo-planet hunters. Mercury and Venus are about to receive visitors. Is there life on Mars? will have to wait longer, because of the war in Ukraine. What happens when dark matter touches dark energy? A mission to draw a map of one percent of the known universe. An asteroid defense solution, a way to corral space debris. |
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National Centre for Space Studies France went through the rubble of World War 2 on the search for all things ballistic. Victorious though battered, the nation had already set altitude records when the 18th century was still young. In 1947, a lab was set up to tinker with these finds to glean achievements in German “rocket propulsion and guidance.” ❚ ❙ ❚ In 1961 France established the National Centre for Space Research, with a mission to transpose civilization to space. Before that could happen, they inaugurated space medicine in 1982 by hooking up astronaut Jean-Loup Crétien (b.1938) to monitors. The go-to space agency for all things UFO, with a collection going back to 1954. ❚ ❙ ❚ Today, France’s aerospace program, having just joined the air force, faced a setback from Covid-19. |
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NASA When World War 2 ended, America set in motion Operation Paperclip, to retrieve German rocket science. They found production site blueprints, V-2 rockets (100), other technology. They also found rocketeer Wernher von Braun (b.1912), who was amenable to continue where he had left off, and who crossed the Atlantic into another life. ❚ ❚ ❚ Soon enough, in Pasadena, the rocket-building Jet Propulsion Lab was conducting numerous tests. The government noticed, and in 1958 built NASA with them and the Cold War in mind. ❚ ❚ ❚ In 2019, never before seen footage from the Apollo 11 mission were stitched with memorable moments for an edge of the seat account of the first crewed mission to the Moon. ❚ ❚ ❚ Today, NASA wants to be the first to reach jupiter moon Europa, in 2030. It wants to partner with other space agencies for an expedition to the moon, and maybe build a telescope on the far side. Their astrobiologists are monitoring how the human body can be harmed by cosmic rays and its “diverse combinations of multiple ion-energy beams.” |
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Japan Aerospace Exploratory Agency Hideo Itokawa (b.1935), graduate at Tokyo’s imperial university with a major in aeronautics, test launched a small rocket in 1955 and ushered in Japan’s space age. ❚•❚ Fast forward fourteen years, when three science laboratories found that they all needed more room. Since their research into radio astronomy, deciphering the magnetosphere, and secrets of X-ray were complementary, they came together in 2003 as the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. 宇 宙 航 空 研 究 開 発 機 構 (JAXA)’s motto is “explore to realize,” and today conducts innovative research. Theirs is the largest ISS module and given wholly to experiments. JAXA has already sent a spacecraft to rendezvous with space rock Ryugu and, before releasing a lander, took a potshot to create a crater and expose some underlying stuff. Placing 0.19 oz (5 grams) of soil into an envelope, the lander flung these ancient samples back to Earth, some 190 million miles (300 million km) away. Now it wants to repeat the exercise on the martian moon Phobos. |
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Canadian Space Agency The Royal Canadian Air Force fought for the allies in World War 2, and flew transport, reconnaissance, fighter and bomber missions. Afterwards, they maintained their fleet and thought about going higher. In 1962 they sent a rocket into space. ❚ • ❚ Today, the Canadian Space Agency shares its knowledge for the “benefit of Canadians and humanity.” CSA has joined the Artemis mission to the Moon, and their website has indigenous Moon tales plus the thirteen-moons cycle of First Nations. ❚ • ❚ Footage from an astronaut training camp in Canada exists, so too of a singing astronaut. |
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UK Space Agency Sometime in 1933, august British sky watchers created the world’s first interplanetary society. After World War 2, the government set in motion Operation Backfire, in an effort to recover V-2 rockets. In 1957, a rocket launch successfully reached an altitude of 124 miles (200 km). ❚❚❚ Today, the United Kingdom Space Agency is a champion for sustainable development, wants to tackle space debris – an emerging menace, and design their spaceport. Patience may be rewarded perusing the Royal Air Force website to find a folder on UFOs, “comprising entirely of correspondence with members of the public” and going back fifty years. |
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National Space Agency of Ukraine Hearhiy Fedorovych Proskura (b.1876), graduate of Moscow’s imperial technical college, went into the manufacturing of pumps, gears and turbines for purposes of hydraulic thrust. Gathering together like-minds, they formed an aeronautics club, and, in 1937, shot a missile high over Kharkiv in Ukraine. Fast forward to the 1960s, when the soviet government retooled an automobile plant there and began manufacturing rockets. This factory is today the National Space Agency of Ukraine, a descendant of the soviet space program. ❚❚ On February 24 2002, Russia invaded Ukraine and a special force was sent to capture Kharkiv, where the space agency has its headquarters. |
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Russian Federal Space Agency Russia’s rational rendering of heaven had its beginnings in the 19th century. Theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (b.1857) mulled on how humankind will survive in space and drew cut-away spaceship habitats. Scientist Friedrich Zander (b.1887) figured out practical applications for liquid-fuels, a necessity for escaping Earth’s gravity. Adherents and students built an academy, which was folded into a classified military program in 1992, and Roscosmos is its public face. ❚ ❚❚ When they sent the first dog into space, in 1957, their motto in 1957 was ‘In Space We Trust.’ The first woman, Valentina Tereshkova (b.1937), and first man, Yuri Gargarin (b.1934), were also Russian. Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov (b.1934) performed the first space walk in 1965 (12:09): “I stepped into that void and I didn’t fall in. I was mesmerised by the stars. They were everywhere – up above, down below, to the left, to the right.” The best-looking satellite is still the first, also launched in 1957: Sputnik-1, a globe with four antennae. ❚ ❚❚ When the soviet union fell, its space program was split: the main site remained in Russia, but a sliver, responsible for rockets, was marooned in Ukraine. |
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Romanian Space Agency Conrad Haas (b.1509) was a “fyer workes” technician and had developed a multi-stage display that always drew a gasp from his audience. He was born in present-day Romania, where a taste for shooting things into space has never waned. The Moon was wooed in 1906 by aero-mechanic Traian Vuia (b.1872), inventor of the “autonomous take-off aeroplane”. Henri Coanda (b.1886) wooed her four years later in a “jet aeroplane”. ❚❙❚ When director Fritz Lang (b.1890) made Woman on the Moon, a 1929 silent black-&-white scifi adventure, he brought on board rocketeer Hermann Oberth (b.1904) to make the look and feel of sequences involving spaceflight authentic. Oberth recalls: “During my work on the film I was able to convince Lang that it would be great publicity for his movie if we did some serious research at the same time. He was able to finance me and I was finally able to begin performing actual experiments.” ❚❙❚ Today, the Romanian Space Agency has signed on to the Artemis mission, NASA’s lunar exploration expedition, and hosts the annual Yuri’s Night. |
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German Aerospace Center In 1907, mechanic Ludwig Prandtl (b.1875) set up a rudimentary aerodynamic laboratory and conducted experiments. Soon enough, interest came from a society, an association, an institution and a consortium. They all shook hands while studying the sky, in hopes of designing the perfect airship. Their efforts were repurposed during World War 2. ❚❚❚ In the final days of fighting, astronomer Gerard Kuiper (b.1905) drove an allied jeep into Berlin to find and bring physicist Max Planck (b.1858) to safety. The 87-year-old theorist was researching how atoms (matter) and sub-atoms (light) are governed, and many were paying attention. ❚❚❚ When the fighting was over, nearby aviators, generals, researchers, coders and scientists found each other again, and resumed research for a propulsive physics as a space society. Then became the German Aerospace Center, a national center for energy, transport and aerospace research. |