Welcome to the online studio of Francisco Mattos, built w/ printed pieces, experiments, souvenirs, personal projects.
-| April 2023 |-
PIXELS WORLD WIDE WAR
RED MIRAGE Donald Trump never said he’d abide by the outcome of the election.
In May of 2020, fearing that Biden might win in November, he tweeted, “It will be the greatest Rigged Election in history!” He understood that he would likely lose but that, owing to an effect known as the Red Mirage, it would look, for a while, as if he had won: more Democrats than Republicans would vote by mail and since mail-in ballots are often the last to be counted, early counting would favor Republicans. “When that happens,” Roger Stone advised him, “the key thing to do is to claim victory. ... No, we won. Fuck you, Sorry. Over.” That was Plan A.
In September, The Atlantic published a bombshell article by Barton Gellman reporting that the Trump campaign had a scheme “to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.”
That was Plan B.
Plan A (‘Fuck you’) was more Trump’s style. “He’s gonna declare victory,” Steve Bannon said. “But that doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
On Election Night, November 3rd, Trump wanted to do just that, but his campaign team persuaded him not to. His patience didn’t last long. “This is a fraud on the American public,” Trump said on November 4th. “We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.” The next day he tweeted, “Stop The Count!” On November 7th, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, ABC, the Associated Press, and Fox News all declared that Joseph Biden had won. The election was not close. Counting the votes just took a while.
After Biden won, Trump continued to insist that widespread fraud had been committed.
Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, told the January 6 Committee that the campaign became a “truth telling squad,” chasing allegations, discovering them to be unfounded, and telling the President, “Yeah, that wasn’t true.” The Department of Homeland Security looked into allegations, most of which popped up online, and announced, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” The Justice Department, too, investigated charges of fraud, but, as Barr informed the committee, he was left telling the President, repeatedly, “They’re not panning out.”
For Plan C, the President turned to Rudy Giuliani and a group of lawyers that included Sidney Powell.
They filed 62 lawsuits challenging election results, and lost all but one of these suits (and that one involved neither allegations of fraud nor any significant number of votes). Twenty-two of the judges who decided these cases had been appointed by Republicans, and ten had been appointed by Trump.
On December 11th, the Supreme Court rejected a suit that had challenged the results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Trump had had every right to challenge the results of state elections, but at this point he had exhausted his legal options. He decided to fall back on Plan B, the fake-electors plan, which required hundreds of legislators across the country to set aside the popular vote in states won by Biden, claiming that the results were fraudulent and appointing their own slate of electors, who would cast their Electoral College votes for Trump on December 14th. According to Cassidy Hutchison, an aide to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, the White House counsel determined that, since none of the fraud allegations had been upheld by any court, the fake-electors plan was illegal. But one deputy assistant to the President told Trump that it didn’t matter whether there had been fraud or not, because “state legislators ‘have the constitutional right to substitute their judgment for a certified majority of their constituents’ if that prevents socaialism.”
Plan B required Trump to put pressure on a lot of people.
The committee counted at least 200 attempts he made to influence state or local officials by phone, text, posts, or public remarks. Instructing Trump supporters to join in, Giuliani said, “Sometimes it even requires being threatened.” A Trump-campaign spreadsheet documents efforts to contact more than 190 Republican state legislators in Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan alone.
Barr resigned. “I didn’t want to be part of it,” he told the committee.
Plenty of other people were happy to be part of it, though. Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chair, participated and provided Trump with the assistance of RNC staffers. On December 14th, certified electors met in every state. In seven states that Biden had won – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – fake electors also met and produced counterfeit Electoral College certificates for Trump. Five of these certificates were sent to Washington but were rejected because they lacked the required state seal; two arrived after the deadline. None were accepted.
Trump then launched Plan D, which was not so much a plan as a pig’s breakfast of a conspiracy, a coup, and a putsch.
Everything turned on January 6th, the day a joint session of Congress was to certify the results of the Electoral College vote. To stop that from happening, Trump recruited members of Congress into a conspiracy to overturn the election by rejectving the certified votes and accepting the counterfeits; he asked the Vice-President to participate in a coup by simply declaring him the winner; and he incited his supporters to take over the Capitol by force, in a poorly planned putsch, which he intended to lead. On December 17th, Kayleigh McEnany said on Fox News, “There has been an alternate slate of electors voted upon that Congress will decide in January.” Two days later, Trump tweeted, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild.” The legal architect of the Pence part of the pig’s breakfast – “a coup in search of a legal theory,” as one federal judge called it – was a lawyer named John Eastman. The Trump lawyer Eric Herschmann recalled a conversation he had with Eastman: “You’re saying you believe the Vice President, acting as President of the Senate, can be the sole decisionmaker as to, under your theory, who becomes the next President of the United States? And he said, yes. And I said, are you out of your Fing mind?”
Trump pressed the acting Attorney General, Jeffrey Rosen, and other members of the Department of Justice to aid the conspiracy by declaring some of the voting to have been fraudulent.
Rosen refused. “The DOJ can’t and won’t snap its fingers and change the outcome of the election,” he told Trump. Trump replied, “I don’t expect you to do that. Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen.” Trump tried to replace Rosen with a lackey named Jeffrey Clark, but, in a tense meeting at the White House on January 3rd, Rosen and others made clear to him that, if he did so, much of the department would resign. Trump and Eastman met repeatedly with Pence in the Oval Office and tried to recruit him into the conspiracy. Pence refused. At 11:20 am on January 6th, Trump called Pence and again asked him, and again Pence refused, after which, according to Ivanka, the President called the Vice-President a pussy.
Trump was slated to speak at his be-wild rally at the Ellipse at noon, but when he arrived he was unhappy about the size of the crowd.
The Secret Service had set up magnetometers, known as mags, to screen for weapons. Twenty-eight thousand people went through the mags, from whom the Secret Service collected, among other banned items, “269 knives or bades, 242 cannisters of pepper spray, 18 brass knuckles, 18 tasers, 6 pieces of body armor, 3 gas masks, 30 batons or blunt instruments.” Some people had ditched their bags, and presumably their weapons, in trees or cars. In a crowd that included members of white-supremacist and far-right, anti-government extremist groups – including the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, America First, and QAnon – another 25,000 people simply refused to go through the mags. “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons,” Trump shouted. “They’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags away.” The mags stayed. Trump took to the podium and fired up his followers for the march to the Capitol until 1:10 pm, and then he walked to his motorcade, climbed into the Presidential S.U.V., which is known as the Beast, and demanded to be driven to the Capitol. Secret Service agents persuaded him to return to the White House.
Just before the Joint Session was to begin, at one o’clock, Pence released a written statement: “I do not believe that the Founders of our country intended to invest the Vice President with unilateral authority to decide which electoral votes should be counted during the Joint Session of Congress.”
The voting began. By 1:21, Trump had been informed that the Capitol was under attack. He spent the rest of the day watching it on television. For hours, his staff and his advisers begged him to order the mob to disperse or to call for military assistance; he refused. At 1:46 Representative Paul Gosar objected to the count from Arizona, after which Senator Ted Cruz endorsed that objection. Pence was evacuated at 2:12. Seconds later, Proud Boys achieved the first breach of the Capitol, smashing a window in the Senate wing. Eleven minutes later, the mob broke through the doors to the East Rotunda, and Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.” The mob chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.” Meadows told a colleague, “He thinks Mike deserves it.” Kevin McCarthy called the President. “They literally just came through my office windows,” he said. “You need to call them off.” Trump said, “Well, Kevin, I guess they’re just more upset about the election theft than you are.” At 4:17 pm, the President released a video message in which he asked the insurrectionists to go home, and told them that he loved them.
And that, in brief, is the executive summary of the January 6 Commission Report, which concludes that “the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump.”
DISPATCH
The seat of national power, Kyiv was the main prize. Thus the thrust by elite airborne forces in the war’s opening hours.
When President Vladimir Putin launched his war on Feb. 24 after months of buildup on Ukraine’s borders, he sent hundreds of helicopter-borne commandos – the best of the best of Russia’s “spetsnaz” (special forces soldiers) – to assault and seize a lightly defended airfield on Kyiv’s doorstep.
On the first morning of the war, Russian Mi-8 assault helicopters soared south toward Kyiv on a mission to attack Hostomel airfield on the northwest outskirts of the capital. By capturing the airfield, also known as Antonov airport, the Russians planned to establish a base from which to fly in more troops and light armored vehicles within striking distance of the heart of the nation’s largest city. It didn’t work that way. Several Russian helicopters were reported to be hit by missiles even before they got to Hostomel, and once settled in at the airfield they suffered heavy losses from artillery fire.
The fact that the Hostomel assault by the Russian 45th Guards Special Purpose Airborne Brigade faltered might not stand out in retrospect if the broader Russian effort had improved from that point. But it did not. ... Last week the Russians abandoned Hostomel airfield as part of a wholesale retreat into Belarus and Russia.
An effort to take control of a military airbase in Vasylkiv south of Kyiv also met stiff resistance and reportedly saw several Russian Il-76 heavy-lift transport planes carrying paratroopers downed by Ukrainian defenses.
A sidelight of the battle for Kyiv was the widely reported saga of a Russian resupply convoy that stretched dozens of miles along a main roadway toward the capital. It initially seemed to be a worrisome sign for the Ukrainians, but they managed to attack elements of the convoy, which had limited off-road capability and thus eventually dispersed or otherwise became a non-factor in the fight. “They never really provided a resupply of any value to Russian forces that were assembling around Kyiv, never really came to their aid,” said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. “The Ukrainians put a stop to that convoy pretty quickly by being very nimble, knocking out bridges, hitting lead vehicles and stopping their movement.” Using a wide array of Western arms, including Javelin portable anti-tank weapons, shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and much more.
“That’s a really bad combination if you want to conquer a country,” said Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel and professor of military history at Ohio State University. “[The Russian Army]’s proven itself to be wholly incapable of conducting modern armored warfare”. ... Some analysts did question whether Putin appreciated how much Ukraine’s forces had gained from Western training that intensified after Putin’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and incursion into the Donbas.
“It’s stunning,” said military historian Frederick Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War, who says he knows of no parallel to a major military power like Russia invading a country at the time of its choosing and failing so utterly. The Russians underestimated the number of troops they would need and showed “an astonishing inability” to perform basic military functions.
Putin failed to achieve his goal of quickly crushing Ukraine’s outgunned and outnumbered army. The Russians were ill-prepared for Ukrainian resistance, proved incapable of adjusting to setbacks, failed to effectively combine air and land operations, misjudged Ukraine’s ability to defend its skies, and bungled basic military functions like planning and executing the movement of supplies.
TIMELINE
BY THE FIRST WEEK of November 1918, the first world war was drawing to a close. When it began, in August 1914, both sides confidently predicted they would be victorious “before the autumn leaves fell from the trees”. Instead, the war turned into a four-year deadlock. It was the Germans who broke first. The United States had belatedly entered the war in 1917, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1918 that the hastily-trained doughboys, armed largely with French weapons, began arriving in significant numbers. It was enough to break the spine of the exhausted German Army, and by September 1918 the Kaiser’s troops were in retreat everywhere, and the Kaiser himself was forced to abdicate by a rebellion of the war-weary German population.
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November 11 1918, the last day of World War One
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At 5 am the French, British, American and German representatives signed the armistice treaty that formally ended hostilities in World War One. Under the terms of the Armistice, the war would officially end at 11 am that morning. All the troops in the trenches had to do was sit tight for the next six hours. Instead, allied forces continued to launch a series of attacks, producing over 10,000 casualties on the last morning of a war that was already over.
0510
At 5:10 am on November 11, the instrument of surrender was signed. To give everyone enough time to contact all their forces in the field, it was agreed that the formal end of hostilities would occur at 11 am that morning.
An hour earlier, at 4 am, the Fifth Marine Division was ordered to cross the Meuse River on pontoon bridges, and came under artillery and MG fire. The Marines took over 1,100 casualties.
The US Army’s 89th Division was ordered to storm the town of Stenay because, the commander later explained, it had a number of bath-houses and he didn’t want the Germans to have them after the war was over. It cost the Americans 61 dead and 304 wounded to take Stenay.
The 92nd Division, an African-American unit with white officers, had been scheduled for days to make an attack on the morning of the 11th. The result was, General John Sherburne bitterly declared, “an absolutely needless waste of life”.
0600
Although the allied forces had known for the past three days that an armistice was being discussed and the war was almost over, it wasn’t until 6 am that official instructions went out declaring that the war would formally end at 11 am. Foch had picked that time, as it was poetically the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
0930
Irishman Private George Edwin Elison, who had helped defend Mons from the Germans back in 1914, now became the last British soldier killed. It was 9:30 am.
1040
At 10:40 am, in the 81st Division, the commanding officer ordered his men to stand down; his superior countermanded that order and told the men to advance. The division lost 66 killed and 395 wounded.
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At 10:44 am, the 313th Regiment was ordered to clear out a German MG post at the village of Ville-Devant-Chaumont. As the American troops advanced, the Germans, in utter disbelief, first waved at them frantically, then fired over their heads to try to get them to stop, and finally in desperation fired a short burst directly at them. Private Henry Gunter, who had arrived in the trenches four months ago, was struck in the head and died instantly. He was the last American killed in the war. The time was 10:59 am.
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Meanwhile, the attack on Mons continued. At 10:58 am, Canadian trooper Private George Price became the last soldier of the British Commonwealth to be killed.
At 11 am, a German junior officer named Tomas left his trench and approached a group of American troopers in No Man’s Land. As Tomas came forward, they shot him. It was 11:02 am. The cost on the last day of World War One was over 10,000 casualties, wounded or killed: 1200 French; 2400 British; 3000 Americans; 4100 Germans.
ON the 18th and 19th of November the [Russia and Austria] army advanced two days’ march, and the [French] enemy’s outposts after a brief interchange of shots retreated. In the highest army circles from midday on the 19th a great, excitedly bustling activity began which lasted till the morning of the 20th, when the memorable battle of Austerlitz was fought.
UNTIL midday on the 19th the activity, the eager talk, running to and fro, and dispatching of adjutants, was confined to the Emperor’s headquarters (i.e., Alexander I of Russia). But on the afternoon of that day this activity reached [General of the Russian Army] Kutuzov’s headquarters and the staffs of the commanders of columns. By evening the adjutants had spread it to all ends and parts of the army, and in the night from the 19th to the 20th the whole eighty thousand allied troops rose from their bivouacs to the hum of voices, and the army swayed and started in one enormous mass six miles long.
THE concentrated activity which had begun at the Emperor’s headquarters in the morning and had started the whole movement that followed, was like the first movement of the main wheel of a large tower-clock. One wheel slowly moved, another was set in motion, and a third, and wheels began to revolve faster and faster, levers and cog-wheels to work, chimes to play, figures to pop out, and the hands to advance with regular motion as a result of all that activity.
JUST as in the mechanism of a clock, so in the mechanism of the military machine, an impulse once given leads to the final result; and just as indifferently quiescent till the moment when motion is transmitted to them are the parts of the mechanism which the impulse has not yet reached. Wheels creak on their axles as the cogs engage one another and the revolving pulleys whirr with the rapidity of their movement, but a neighbouring wheel is as quiet and motionless as though it were prepared to remain so for a hundred years; but the moment comes when the lever catches it, and obeying the impulse that wheel begins to creak, and joins in the common motion the result and aim of which are beyond its ken.
JUST as in a clock the result of the complicated motion of innumerable wheels and pulleys is merely a slow and regular movement of the hands which show the time, so the result of all the complicated human activities of 160,000 Russians and French – all their passions, desires, remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm – was only the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called battle of the three Emperors – that is to say, a slow movement of the hand on the dial of human history.
HELLO
Welcome to the online studio of Francisco Mattos, built with experiments in online layouts, and pin-ups from my scrapbooks.
PORTFOLIO
Holiday Card for De Vera. Die-punched rubber leaf.
MATINEE The Lighthouse (2019) 1h49m ╋ Power of the Dog (2021) 2h6m
In 1925 cattle country, single mom Kirsten Dunst and son Kodi Smit-McPhee run a roadhouse diner. Brothers Jesse Plemons and Benedict Cumberbatch own a nearby ranch. One will end up wielding the Power of the Dog? Based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel.
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Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson are “wickies” on a three-month assignment to tend to The Lighthouse on a remote rock in the sea. There they greet seagulls and Proteus, the antique shape-shifting marine being. Sourced from a 19th century murder at a Welsh lighthouse.
Speed (1936) 1h10m ╋ Ford v Ferrari (2019) 2h32m
The quest for Speed leads to a better carburetor, in a B-movie featuring rear projections of vintage footage. The ending is a recreation of Malcolm Campbell’s record-breaking 300 mph drive at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. James Stewart’s first film.
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Film treatment of auto builder Henry Ford II, auto designer Carroll Shelby and driver Ken Miles. Magnate Tracy Letts hires Matt Damon, and Christian Bale to take on the Italian racing team Scuderia Ferrari, aka Ford v Ferrari, at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans race in France.
Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) 1h53m ╋ Gentleman Jim (1942) 1h44m
Paul Newman plays real-life boxer Rocky Graziano, knowing in his heart that Somebody Up There Likes Me, because Pier Angeli plays his wife. Taken from the autobiography of the 1947 world middleweight champion, when he was age 28.
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Errol Flynn is boxer Gentleman Jim Corbett in 1880s San Francisco, and loves Alexis Smith. His entourage consists of the singulary Jack Carson, and William Frawley is his manager. Sourced from the autobiography of heavyweight champion Jim Corbett, and the then-new Marquis of Queensbury Rules.
American Psycho (2000) 1h42m ╋ Danton (1983) 2h16m
Crisp and cool, ferocious and bloody, Christian Bale is Wall Street worker Patrick Bateman, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, transferred undiluted to the screen by director Mary Harron.
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Taking place five years after the 1789 French Revolution, Georges Danton returns to a Paris undergoing the Terror, overseen by the Security Committee and led by Maxime Robespierre.
Fantastic Voyage (1966) 1h40m ╋ Powers of Ten (1977) 9m
A life-saving team is assembled inside a hi-tech ship, then the whole bombarded by a formula raygun, “for unlimited miniaturization”, in order to fit inside a syringe and be injected into a comatose patient, go on a Fantastic Voyage in the body, to reach and perform a life-saving procedure, from inside the brain.
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An educational film, made by Charles and Ray Eames, takes a trip to outer space, to locate and show Earth among the galaxies, relatively speaking. The second half of Powers of Ten then goes inside the human body, to reveal the cells, molecules, atoms, protons of inner space.
Ladybug, Ladybug (1963) 1h22m ╋ A Short Vision (1956) 6m9s
An air raid alarm goes off at a junior high school, while classes are in session. The faculty’s by-the-book evacuation plan is put into effect, and children either are bussed off, or else walk home in a group, led by a teacher, playing a singing game of Ladybug, Ladybug as they skip along.
╋A Short Vision is an animation about the last humans, by Jon and Peter Foldes.
The Ugly American (1963) 2h ╋ Indochine (1991) 2h40m
Marlon Brando plays a diplomat, in the 1950s, tasked to find the correct path to thread. Based on The Ugly American (1963) by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, and taking place in Southeast Asia among members of the U.S. diplomatic corps.
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The founding of the Indochinese Communist Party in the 1930s is set among the privileged world of Europeans living in Indochine, during the waning light of French empire.
War of the Insects (1968) 1h24m ╋ Tetsuo: the Iron Man (1989) 1h7m
Reckless humans persuing atomic experiments trigger unbalance in Nature and a revolt, in the War of the Insects, slapping a suitably corrosive plot with topical touchstones. “I just love insects, because they never lie.”
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Made at the height of the globe-spanning body-modification movement. Following a car accident with a ‘metals fetishist’, science rebuilds Tetsuo: the Iron Man. Trailer, with music by Sinya Tsukamoto and Trent Reznor.
No Time For Comedy (1949) ╋ Youngblood Hawke (1964)
Curdled comedy starts out cute and ends on the stage of an empty theater. James Stewart is the playwright, and actress Rosalind Russell his wife. Robert Grieg plays the butler, and J.M. Kerrigan the mum bartender. A jaw-dropping performance by Louise Beavers as Clementine the maid belies the fact that there is No Time For Comedy.
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Talented, when yet a greenhorn from a mining town in Kentucky, pens a novel and soon Youngblood Hawke becomes the toast of New York City. James Franciscus is the writer, with Suzanne Pleshette, Genevieve Page, Eva Gabor, Mary Astor.
Three Strangers (1946) 1h32m ╋ Portrait in Black (1960) 1h52m
Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Geraldine Fitzgerald come together as Three Strangers, to enact a group ritual before an incense altar, and unlock a prophecy to acquire untold wealth. Edited just so to agitate slightly, keeping at bay the ending.
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Anna May Wong, in her last role, plays the live-in servant, and may be responsible for a Portrait in Black, as she answers doorbells in the chinoiserie quarters of ailing San Francisco shipping magnate Lloyd Nolan. Lana Turner is his wife, Anthony Quinn her lover, Sandra Dee her stepdaughter, and John Saxon the beau.
Sundays and Cybele (1962) 1h51m ╋ The Children Are Watching Us (1943) 1h15m
Luciano de Ambrosis is unhappy, witness to parental infidelity, discord and worse. Nicoletta Parodi is his nanny, who knows The Children Are Watching Us. Lost-world direction by Vittorio De Sica.
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Patricia Gozzi is the girl abandoned by her father at a boarding school. Hardy Kruger is the shell-shocked soldier who contrives a ruse, Sundays and Cybele, to both help her and heal himself.
Search for Beauty (1934) 1h18m ╋ Murder At the Vanities (1934) 1h29m
Kitty Carlisle and Carl Brisson are the top-billing stars of a big Broadway show, where a Murder At the Vanities mars opening night. Lucille Ball, Ann Sheridan and Alan Ladd are chorus members, Gertrude Michael a spiteful actress, and Charles Middleton is Ming the Merciless.
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Tossing out a fuck-you kiss to the incoming Hayes Code era of film censorship, Hollywood makes the raunchiest pre-code movie: a Search for Beauty at a health resort, where Buster Crabbe and Ida Lupino lead a bevy of cuties and nudies on ten-mile hikes by day and drinking parties all night.
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Rocket science is a skilled craft as ancient as throwing a club, slinging a rock, or hitting a target with the bow and arrow. For the last hundred years or so, self-taught rocketeers have been aiming for outer space while shooting for the Moon. Space agencies regularly launch humans, spaceprobes, orbiters, landers, robots, telescopes, etc., to study the solar system and beyond.
Take Saturn for instance. The number of moons found by 2015 was 62, four years later 20 more were added. In 2017, during NASA’s flyby of the rings of Saturn, remnants of numerous shattered satellites, what Cassini observed instead was untold thousands, millions, of dwarf moons, shepherd moons, moonlets, and moonmoons.
International Space Station
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The International Space Station is a 1998 partnership of fifteen nations, covering legal, financial and political implications in how the station is utilized. Five nations coordinate day-to-day, direct traffic routes, assign crew time.
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The era of surrendering to comfort while in zero gravity took place unobtrusively in 1988, as the first piece of the future ISS arrived at its orbital destination, 250-260 mi (400-420 m) above Earth.
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The Russian-built module Zarya was designed to be self-contained and “an autonomous space habitat for eight months,” because the second module wouldn’t show up until then.
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This mini space station was powered by six nickel-cadium batteries and two solar arrays, had three docking ports. Oxygen circulated from a pressurized valve unit with air ducts, funnel containment filters, dust collectors, portable fans. There is a gas analyzer, a smoke detector, gas masks.
The cabin comes with a pole, handrails, hooks, instrument containers. Waste went to container connections for contingency transfer of water; with wipes, container bags, and “filters.”
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Fully assembled, the ISS has become a maze of 16 interconnected modules. There is a basic gym, and the bathrooms are in chambers housing the waste management system. The station is serviced by three robots, capable of independent or conjoined assignments on the outside.
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Twenty-five years plus of flying has led to wear and tear, causing “torsional strains, temperature impacts, micrometeoroid impacts.”
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The next space station is in development, with better spacesuits, better bathrooms. Everything will get an upgrade; design for the current station was based on 1990s know-how. Even the modules come in several varieties: ones capable of uncoupling and become autonomous, and ones “for private visits.”
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When the time comes, NASA will guide the retired space station back into the atmosphere, where it will burn up and disintegrate, etc. This is a scenario that will take three years to achieve, aiming for Point Nemo in the South Pacific. When around 155 mi (250km) above Earth, where gravity reasserts, there will be a final mission to pick up remaining crew and research. Another spacecraft will take over and steer the space station to its watery grave.
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SANSA
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On the tip of South Africa, the Hermanus Magnetic Observatory (est.1841) began to collect data on Earth’s magnetic field.
Early evidence had given credence that the magnetic field plays an “important role in making the planet habitable.” It perpetually starts in the Earth’s core, where molten iron churns and bits break off, then cool, and emit “rule-driven electro-magnetic arcs,” before falling back into the heat. These arcs ripple and wrap the planet, affecting the ionosphere, the tides, and other global phenomena.
Today, the observatory is overseen by the Department of Physics at the University of Capetown, and participates in the country’s space sciences. The South African Space Program is the sole weather-activity center for all of Africa, employing a fleet of satellites giving feedback for fires, flooding, etc.
وكالة الإمارات للفضاء
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The United Arab Emirates, by a decree from the president, joined the space age in 2014. Seven years later they would have a spacecraft orbiting Mars, on a years-long mission to map the planet.
The United Arab Emirates Space Agency also plans to go to the Asteroid Belt and probe seven rocks before landing on the eighth, in 2033.
中 国 航 天 科 工 集 团 有 限 公 司
❚★❚China National Space Administration is the second name for a space program which was hatched by the military in the late 1950s, orbiting around the American-trained rocketeer Tsien Hsue-Shen. In 2003 China would become the third nation, after Russia and the US, to send a man to space.
China’s inaugural mission to the Moon had landed in 2013 and then stopped communicating. A second mission in 2019 landed and grew a leaf. The third planted a flag, then flew home.
China’s first space station launched in 2011, and expired six years later, beginning with a death dive that lasted four months, tumbling head over heel before crashing into the South Pacific, in 2018. By then, work on the second space station had already begun. Construction crews had rotated on months-long assignments to assemble Tiangong-2, which became partially operational in 2021, orbiting 280-210 mi (450-340 km) above the Earth.
European Space Agency
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On February 24 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the European Space Agency immediately abandoned plans with Russia on a mission to Mars. ESA director general Joseph Aschbacher said: “I think the war in Ukraine has made politicians realize that we are a bit vulnerable and we have to make sure that we have our own secured access to space and our space infrastructure.”
Eight days before war broke out, French president Emmanuel Macron had said: “There is no full power or autonomy without managing space. Without (it) you can’t conquer new frontiers or even control your own.”
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After the Second World War, dispersed remnants of European aeronautical societies kept in contact, and found enough momentum that in 1975 they partnered for a “cohesive approach to space,” as a multi-nation space agency.
ESA is planning on a forensic mission to the Asteroid Belt in 2024, as a follow-up to NASA’s 2022 demonstration of a double-asteroid defense test. Hera will travel to and hover near Didymos-Dimorphos (asteroid and moonlet), a binary system circling each other while orbiting the Sun.
Hubble Space Telescope
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Launching into orbital position in 1990, some 340 mi (540 km) above Earth, the Hubble Space Telescope had inaugurated a new era in far-out astronomy. It has already reported back on the many moons Jupiter and of Saturn; the Small Magellanic Cloud; the Large Magellanic Cloud; and took an image of 3 million billion suns.
NASA has plans to keep Hubble operational until 2037, but there is also a deorbiting safety plan in place. During a recent mission, crew arrived and installed a hook on the hull of the telescope. When the time comes, a spacecraft will arrive and attach itself to the hook, commandeering Hubble and guiding it on its descent.
James Webb Space Telescope
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The James Webb Space Telescope waved bye bye to Earth on Christmas morning in 2021, taking off to its lonely position, far far beyond the Moon.
Having arrived at its orbital destination, JWST’s sunshield then unfurled as expected, when all 107 pins popped “open in the proper sequence.” Next day, as the last mirror panel rotated into position, the primary mirror opened its eye to begin the new era of infrared astronomy.
The first year is booked solid with requests. Among the successful proposals submitted, JWST will get to track 100 asteroids so as to “derive the amount of water present” in the Asteroid Belt; to study all 27 moons of Uranus; to measure the weather of Pluto and its giant moon Charon, the original binary system; etc.
Paola Santini, co-author of “Grism Lens-Amplified Survey from Space (GLASS),” told a reporter: “This is a whole new chapter in astronomy. It’s like an archeological dig, and suddenly you find a lost city or something you didn’t know about.”
She might be referring to the Phantom Galaxy, and the supposed black hole at the center. Instead, what JWST found was a spinning wormhole.
Indian Space Research Organisation
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India’s first Moon mission ended on August 28 2009, when the spacecraft, having achieved lunar orbit, stopped communicating. The second attempt, with 56 minutes left to touch down, was hit by a cyberattack.
This was the Chandrayaan-2 mission, which left on July 22 2019 and spent two months in orbit, using Earth to then slingshot out and to approach the Moon. Arriving at an inclination of 88°, “a lunar-orbit insertion maneuver” went off successfully. Twenty-eight minutes later, the lander separated to begin a series of braking sequences which would take five days before touching down. With 1.3 mi (2.1 km) more to go, ground support lost communication with the lander, which then crashed.
This second mission would have drilled into the lunar mantle, and return with samples. The rover was never deployed, it had six wheels, was powered by AI, and was named Pragyan, sanskrit for wisdom.
宇 宙 航 空 研 究 開 発 機 構
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Realizing that their space research in the 1960s were in fact complementary, three Japanese groups came together in 2013 under one roof as the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
JAXA conducts some innovative methods for space exploration. Like sending the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) in 2007 to the International Space Station, dedicated to conducting experiments in zero-gravity. Like sending a robot programmed to flop around in lunar dust or fly to and take a potshot at a potentially dangerous asteroid in 2014, traveling very close to Earth.
Approaching asteroid Ryugu Hayabusa-2 took aim and fired, creating a new crater and exposing underlying stuff. After landing, the robo-crew placed 0.19 oz (5 gr) of soil into an envelope, and flung the mail back to Earth.
In 2010 JAXA had sent a seven-year uncrewed mission to the Asteroid Belt to return with samples. The asteroid was given the name Itokawa, a salute to Hideo Itokawa (b.1935), a graduate in aeronautics who launched a small rocket over Kokubunji, a suburb of Tokyo, in 1955.
Agenţia Spaţialǎ Românǎ
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Romania has a storied past of visiting the sky. Traian Vuia (b.1872) startled the Moon with a flyby in 1906, in his “autonomous take-off aeroplane.” Henri Coanda (b.1886) wooed her four years later in his “jet aeroplane.”
When director Fritz Lang (b.1890) was making Woman on the Moon (1929), he brought in rocketeer Hermann Oberth (b.1904), to make sure that the look and feel of sequences involving spaceflight in the silent b-&-w scifi space adventure was “authentic.”
Today, the Romanian Space Agency is a member of the Artemis Accords, and hosts the annual world-wide 'Yuri’s Night'.
Державне космічне агентство України
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In the 1960s, the Soviet Union retooled an automobile plant in Ukraine, at the time a part of the USSR, and began to manufacture rockets. When the union ended, this factory grew to become a company town. Rocket City is its nickname, and where the State Space Agency of Ukraine is headquartered.
Roscosmos
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As the Soviet Union fell apart the rocket division of its space program became marooned in Ukraine. When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 27 2022, its head of space program bargained with the International Space Station, and said: “If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or Europe? There is also the option of dropping a 500-ton structure on India or China. Do you want to threaten them with such a prospect? The ISS does not fly over Russia, so all the risks are yours. Are you ready for them?”
Before the year was over, there was a new head at the Russian Federal Space Agency, Yury Borisov, who released a timeline for relinquishing their partnership with the ISS.
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Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first to orbit in space, April 12 1961. Cosmonaut Valentina “Seagull” Tereshkova was the first woman, flying 48 times around Earth on June 16 1963. Before humans Russia sent animals to space: fruit flies, a rhesus monkey, dogs, a grey rabbit, 42 mice; in 1968 it was a turtle.
Interkosmos
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In 1967, Russia began sharing satellite technology with other nations, and eventually took some of them to space. The first of these crewed missions, which took off in 1978, was cosmonaut Vladimir Remek paired with Oldrich Pelcak from Czechoslovakia.
Pelcak had become eligible by going to cosmonaut school, in a city-sized campus of space science laboratories, aircraft hangars, training centers. There were living quarters for cosmonauts, trainees and support crew, with shopping and entertainment districts for their families. Opened in 1960, Star City was at the time an hour’s drive from the Kremlin.
NASA
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When the Second World War ended in 1945, the US set in motion a plan to retrieve rocket technology in Europe. Poring over promising plans with red, white & blue eyes, these newly minted rocketeers went on to create the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but nobody calls them by that name.
NASA had gone to the Moon in 1969, then set its sights on Mars. In 1976, two rockets took one-way trips, then a lander touched down in 1997 and rover Sojourner scouted around. Opportunity arrived in 2004, performed for 14 years and, during a fierce gale, choked to death on Martian dust, which had accumulated over time. In 2011, Curiosity found rare quartz. The 2018 mission, to study tremors and quakes, had a rock’n’roll theme: etched on the lander: green day since 1986. Its rover InSight came across a rock slide, and named the spot after a song by the Rolling Stones.
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NASA showcased a viable approach for an asteroid-defense system in 2021 by sending a missile to conduct a “double-asteroid redirection test” in the Asteroid Belt. The resulting impact on the moonlet (satellite to Didymos) had enough force to alter Dimorphos’s trajectory “a bit.”
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Fifty-six minutes into a 1970 crewed lunar mission, the Apollo 13 spacecraft experienced a hardware malfunction, and critical damage ensued. The mission then became one of rescue, as astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert raced to bring what was left of their spacecraft safely back to Earth.
The Artemis Accords
☾⋯☽
Viewing the sky with rainbow eyes, NASA announced in 2017 “principles for a safe, peaceful and prosperous future” in space, beginning with the Moon, where a manufactured world for humans in a deadly landscape is to feature, among many other considerations, the interoperability of all equipment.
Signing on to the Artemis Accords, as of February 2023, were Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, Republic of Korea, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the US.
China and Russia, though, have their own understanding, also lunar in outlook: an as-yet unnamed program which is “open to all interested countries and international partners.”
Canadian Space Agency
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Canada already had an air force by 1924, and would join the Allies in the Second World War, where 17,000 gave their lives fighting on the ground and flying bombers, fighters, reconnaissances and transport around the world. In 1942, Geraldine M. Lascotte heeded the call to duty and was issued an ID Card in order to attend the Ottawa Air Training Conference, learn about airplanes and become a part of the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Afterwards, Canadians came home to realize that they now had the fourth-largest air presence in the world, redoubled their efforts and in 1962 launched a satellite into space.
Today, CSA shares its knowledge for the “benefit of Canadians and humanity,” conducts a camp for astronaut trainees, and has released a video of Chris Hadfield singing Space Oddity onboard the International Space Station.
Astronaut 3.0
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Astronauts on the International Space Station have become conditioned to life in zero gravity, while traveling at five miles per second, 250 mi (400 km) above the Earth. Future forays into deep space will require more stamina, skill sets, different disciplines. To cite just two: an ability to operate different kinds of space vehicles, and a background in geology.
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Life without familiar gravity in an oxygen-free environment has fraught consequences. Bone loss, motion sickness, vitamin deficiency (A,E,C, folic acid, thiamine); regular exposure to queer cosmic rays and unfiltered solar radiation.
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Comfort chambers of the future, though, offer a ray of hope. Going forward, waste management systems will feature a common platform for all conditions of outer space, aiming “to reduce crew time, improve cleanliness, arrive at a reduction in volume and weight of waste.”
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Astronaut 2.0 Jack D. Fischer recalls what it was like being on the ISS in 2017: “Unlike most things, you just can’t train for that on the ground. So I approach my space-toilet activities with respect, preparation and a healthy dose of sheer terror.” (Succumbing to temptation nonetheless, a pizza kit for seven was delivered to the space station on August 10 2021.)
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Firstgen astronauts debuted in 1959. There was aerobatic pilot Betty Skelton (b.1926), who tested experimental craft, and the men chosen to fly the Mercury 7 missions: Scott Carpenter, Gordon “Gordo” Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton.
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Nextgen spacesuits will come with a layer of protection from “elevated radiation exposure,” and designed “to fit every body type.” They will be lighter and less bulky, more hi-tech: in-suit cameras, a digital checklist. Ones for outside work will feature digital navigation aids, and have red and blue arms. Bodywear, too, will be more comfortable: Cooler underwear and made with breathable fabrics for a tighter fit, “to counteract the lack of gravity by squeezing the body from the shoulders to the feet with a similar force to that felt on Earth.”
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.
█
Yesterday’s astronomers had fewer worries, more wonderment. Taking notes, they devised almanacs and calendars. Some built structures to greet celestial returns, Karnak’s temple turns orange with the rising of the midwinter Sun, and the standing stones at Stonehenge ‘has some alignment on astronomical phenomena.’
█
The Babylonians divided the sky into twelve equal wedges, to facilitate the tracking of positions as well as movements. Then a map was passed around, showing longitudes and latitudes. The Vatican became intrigued, wanting to learn more of this new science, which arrived in Europe from Spain, in translations of Indian and Islamic texts, and a mechanism known as an astrolabe, that can show a map of heaven.
█Caroline Herschel (b.1850) started out as an assistant to her astronomer brother William Herschel (b.1738), polishing mirrors and mounting telescopes. When he then discovered Uranus, she too took a peek, and soon enough discoverd a satellite to the Andromeda galaxy: an elliptical dwarf galaxy.
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Then a Harvard computer, while cataloging stars over several photographic glass plates by using a spectroscope, which charts ‘stellar brightness in proportion to luminosity-oscillation periods’ (i.e., the twinkle), devised a ‘standard candle for determining cosmic distances.’ Henrietta Leavitt (b.1868) had just invented a space tape measure to judge distances.
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.
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When the tube became much much larger, a glass plate treated on one side with a photosensitive agent was placed inside, and after a period of time, up to two years, yielded a photograph of stars.
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Author Agnes Giberne (b.1845) wrote the first astronomy books for young minds, bringing them face to face with the Moon, the Sun, comets. “Among the Stars,” which came out in 1885, is 360 pages.
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.
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The photographic evidence were captured on hundreds of glass plates, either 17x14 or 8x10 inches in size. Each plate is overlaid with numbered grids and placed, on an inclined plane, under a microscope. A light under the glass-plate illuminates the photograph.
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The first computer, looking through the microscope, calls out each star’s name and grid position, while another computer enters the information into a ledger.
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The glass plates are also studied using a spectroscope, and requires an aptitude for mathematics to take readings ‘based on the brightness of stars.’ Descriptions can include normal, hazy, sharp, and inter-determinants (several kinds). Because of the long exposure time, the photosensitive agent was able to register ‘long integration times’ yielding data on color, temperature, chemical composition.
█Williamina Fleming (b.1857) was one of the first Harvard computers, a team of women scientists. She had no such background and trained on the job, which was to ‘compute mathematical classifications.’ It turned out she had a flair for the work: “From day to day my duties at the Observatory are so nearly alike that there will be little to describe outside ordinary routine work of measurement, examination of photographs, and of work involved in the reduction of these observations.”
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.”
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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.
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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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Mathematician Dorothy Vaughan (b.1910), in a 28-year career at NASA’s Langley Research Center, became a specialist in calculating flight paths. Vaughan then had access to a new office machine, read the user’s manual, taught herself the machine’s language, Fortran (Formula Translating System), and learned how to program NASA’s first electronic computer.
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Mathematician Grace Hopper (b.1906) championed the use of English in composing tasks fed into electronic computers: “Manipulating symbols was fine for mathematicians but it was no good for data processors who were not symbol manipulators. If they are they become professional mathematicians, not data processors. It’s much easier for most people to write an English statement than it is to use symbols. So I decided data processors ought to be able to write their programs in English, and the computers would translate them into machine code. That was the beginning of COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), a computer language for data processors.”
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Mathematician Evelyn Boyd (b.1924) joined IBM in 1956: “At a two-week training session I was introduced to the IBM 650 and the programing language SOAP. ... Creation of a computer program is an exercise in logical thinking. Afterwards I worked as a consultant in numerical analysis in an IBM subsidiary. When NASA awarded IBM a contract to plan, write, and maintain computer programs I readily agreed ... to be a part of the team of IBM mathematicians and scientists who were responsible for the formulation of orbit computations and computer procedures, first for project Vanguard, and later for project Mercury.”
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Mathematician Melba Roy Mouton (b.1929) worked for the Army Map Service before working as a human computer for NASA, and figuring out trajectory and orbital solutions for a metalized balloon in project Echo.
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Writing propositions and coming up with solutions by hand was routine for mathematician Annie Easley (b.1933). Then electronic computers came along and, although Easley learned Fortran and became a more-valued asset, she still can remember the micro-aggressions: “My head is not in the sand. If I can’t work with you, I will work around you. I was not about to be [so] discouraged that I’d walk away. ... I’m out here to do a job and I knew I had the ability, and that’s where my focus was.”
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Working in the computer pool, Christine Darden (b.1947) was given the task to come up with a computer program for sonic boom. Darden, who grew up taking apart and putting back together bicycles and other manufactured contraptions, is today an aerospace engineer: “I was able to stand on the shoulders of those women who came before me, and women who came after me were able to stand on mine.”
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:
█“Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground? Why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earth”s centre? Assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in, and the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earth’s centre, not in any side of the earth. Therefore does this apple fall perpendicularly, or toward the center. If matter thus draws, it must be in proportion of its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple.” 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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?”
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Sensing fear in the visitors’ eyes, their thunderous voices abated. Then Zephros drew even 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.”
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Notos spread icicles while parting his lips: “Can these regulation systems really help w/ my restlessness? and what’s up w/ 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 aerial adventures 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.
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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.
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Bird wings are folding fans, able to expand and collapse. Each wing is a web of arm bones, having joints which, by evolutionary decree, have quills on the knuckles; each quill grasps one feather.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Dog-earred generals carried mint editions of “The Myth of Icarus” into battle and tasked military engineers to accessorize kites so as to become fit for carrying a passenger. Eventually squadrons of passengers paid visits to the sky, and giving notice that the empire of the four winds was coming to an end.
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Kites were invented for children when they first became aware how they might have, as playpals: the four winds.
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Not for war’s sake, Benjamin Franklin (b.1706) is probably the first to use wind power to send a laboratory into space: kite + key + lightning storm.
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.”
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Soldiers saw the promise and quickly adopted the recipe. Dreamers invented fireworks. Paper tubes filled with confetti and a spoonful of gunpowder then sealed with a fuse sticking out. The tube is tied to a long stick that will act as a tail, then aimed towards the sky. Flame is introduced to the fuse and the detonation produces a propulsive force inside the tube, which ascends before spilling out its contents.
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Although it was John Bate (b.1600s) figured out how to make compound-rockets, which boosted the appeal of his brand of “fyer workes,” it took until Hermann Oberth (b.1894) to sheath it in metal, for the first time, to insure a sturdier flight.
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Fireworks are propelled missiles guided during a brief initial phase of powered flight. Then a subsequent trajectory that obeys the laws of gravity, and codified as
classical mechanics.
a r c h e t y p e█
When World War 2 was over, pilots and other aeronauticals returned to civilian roles.
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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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Governments were wont to fund space explorations, get bragging rights, so
they practised by dividing up North Pole, a melting continent.
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Longitudes and latitudes led to precision mapping of the world, and in the co-mingling of new disciplines rocket science took off to
map a hypothetical heaven.
RED MIRAGE Donald Trump never said he’d abide by the outcome of the election.
In May of 2020, fearing that Biden might win in November, he tweeted, “It will be the greatest Rigged Election in history!” He understood that he would likely lose but that, owing to an effect known as the Red Mirage, it would look, for a while, as if he had won: more Democrats than Republicans would vote by mail and since mail-in ballots are often the last to be counted, early counting would favor Republicans. “When that happens,” Roger Stone advised him, “the key thing to do is to claim victory. ... No, we won. Fuck you, Sorry. Over.” That was Plan A.
In September, The Atlantic published a bombshell article by Barton Gellman reporting that the Trump campaign had a scheme “to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.”
That was Plan B.
Plan A (‘Fuck you’) was more Trump’s style. “He’s gonna declare victory,” Steve Bannon said. “But that doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
On Election Night, November 3rd, Trump wanted to do just that, but his campaign team persuaded him not to. His patience didn’t last long. “This is a fraud on the American public,” Trump said on November 4th. “We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.” The next day he tweeted, “Stop The Count!” On November 7th, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, ABC, the Associated Press, and Fox News all declared that Joseph Biden had won. The election was not close. Counting the votes just took a while.
After Biden won, Trump continued to insist that widespread fraud had been committed.
Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, told the January 6 Committee that the campaign became a “truth telling squad,” chasing allegations, discovering them to be unfounded, and telling the President, “Yeah, that wasn’t true.” The Department of Homeland Security looked into allegations, most of which popped up online, and announced, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” The Justice Department, too, investigated charges of fraud, but, as Barr informed the committee, he was left telling the President, repeatedly, “They’re not panning out.”
For Plan C, the President turned to Rudy Giuliani and a group of lawyers that included Sidney Powell.
They filed 62 lawsuits challenging election results, and lost all but one of these suits (and that one involved neither allegations of fraud nor any significant number of votes). Twenty-two of the judges who decided these cases had been appointed by Republicans, and ten had been appointed by Trump.
On December 11th, the Supreme Court rejected a suit that had challenged the results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Trump had had every right to challenge the results of state elections, but at this point he had exhausted his legal options. He decided to fall back on Plan B, the fake-electors plan, which required hundreds of legislators across the country to set aside the popular vote in states won by Biden, claiming that the results were fraudulent and appointing their own slate of electors, who would cast their Electoral College votes for Trump on December 14th. According to Cassidy Hutchison, an aide to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, the White House counsel determined that, since none of the fraud allegations had been upheld by any court, the fake-electors plan was illegal. But one deputy assistant to the President told Trump that it didn’t matter whether there had been fraud or not, because “state legislators ‘have the constitutional right to substitute their judgment for a certified majority of their constituents’ if that prevents socaialism.”
Plan B required Trump to put pressure on a lot of people.
The committee counted at least 200 attempts he made to influence state or local officials by phone, text, posts, or public remarks. Instructing Trump supporters to join in, Giuliani said, “Sometimes it even requires being threatened.” A Trump-campaign spreadsheet documents efforts to contact more than 190 Republican state legislators in Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan alone.
Barr resigned. “I didn’t want to be part of it,” he told the committee.
Plenty of other people were happy to be part of it, though. Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chair, participated and provided Trump with the assistance of RNC staffers. On December 14th, certified electors met in every state. In seven states that Biden had won – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – fake electors also met and produced counterfeit Electoral College certificates for Trump. Five of these certificates were sent to Washington but were rejected because they lacked the required state seal; two arrived after the deadline. None were accepted.
Trump then launched Plan D, which was not so much a plan as a pig’s breakfast of a conspiracy, a coup, and a putsch.
Everything turned on January 6th, the day a joint session of Congress was to certify the results of the Electoral College vote. To stop that from happening, Trump recruited members of Congress into a conspiracy to overturn the election by rejectving the certified votes and accepting the counterfeits; he asked the Vice-President to participate in a coup by simply declaring him the winner; and he incited his supporters to take over the Capitol by force, in a poorly planned putsch, which he intended to lead. On December 17th, Kayleigh McEnany said on Fox News, “There has been an alternate slate of electors voted upon that Congress will decide in January.” Two days later, Trump tweeted, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild.” The legal architect of the Pence part of the pig’s breakfast – “a coup in search of a legal theory,” as one federal judge called it – was a lawyer named John Eastman. The Trump lawyer Eric Herschmann recalled a conversation he had with Eastman: “You’re saying you believe the Vice President, acting as President of the Senate, can be the sole decisionmaker as to, under your theory, who becomes the next President of the United States? And he said, yes. And I said, are you out of your Fing mind?”
Trump pressed the acting Attorney General, Jeffrey Rosen, and other members of the Department of Justice to aid the conspiracy by declaring some of the voting to have been fraudulent.
Rosen refused. “The DOJ can’t and won’t snap its fingers and change the outcome of the election,” he told Trump. Trump replied, “I don’t expect you to do that. Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen.” Trump tried to replace Rosen with a lackey named Jeffrey Clark, but, in a tense meeting at the White House on January 3rd, Rosen and others made clear to him that, if he did so, much of the department would resign. Trump and Eastman met repeatedly with Pence in the Oval Office and tried to recruit him into the conspiracy. Pence refused. At 11:20 am on January 6th, Trump called Pence and again asked him, and again Pence refused, after which, according to Ivanka, the President called the Vice-President a pussy.
Trump was slated to speak at his be-wild rally at the Ellipse at noon, but when he arrived he was unhappy about the size of the crowd.
The Secret Service had set up magnetometers, known as mags, to screen for weapons. Twenty-eight thousand people went through the mags, from whom the Secret Service collected, among other banned items, “269 knives or bades, 242 cannisters of pepper spray, 18 brass knuckles, 18 tasers, 6 pieces of body armor, 3 gas masks, 30 batons or blunt instruments.” Some people had ditched their bags, and presumably their weapons, in trees or cars. In a crowd that included members of white-supremacist and far-right, anti-government extremist groups – including the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, America First, and QAnon – another 25,000 people simply refused to go through the mags. “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons,” Trump shouted. “They’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags away.” The mags stayed. Trump took to the podium and fired up his followers for the march to the Capitol until 1:10 pm, and then he walked to his motorcade, climbed into the Presidential S.U.V., which is known as the Beast, and demanded to be driven to the Capitol. Secret Service agents persuaded him to return to the White House.
Just before the Joint Session was to begin, at one o’clock, Pence released a written statement: “I do not believe that the Founders of our country intended to invest the Vice President with unilateral authority to decide which electoral votes should be counted during the Joint Session of Congress.”
The voting began. By 1:21, Trump had been informed that the Capitol was under attack. He spent the rest of the day watching it on television. For hours, his staff and his advisers begged him to order the mob to disperse or to call for military assistance; he refused. At 1:46 Representative Paul Gosar objected to the count from Arizona, after which Senator Ted Cruz endorsed that objection. Pence was evacuated at 2:12. Seconds later, Proud Boys achieved the first breach of the Capitol, smashing a window in the Senate wing. Eleven minutes later, the mob broke through the doors to the East Rotunda, and Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.” The mob chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.” Meadows told a colleague, “He thinks Mike deserves it.” Kevin McCarthy called the President. “They literally just came through my office windows,” he said. “You need to call them off.” Trump said, “Well, Kevin, I guess they’re just more upset about the election theft than you are.” At 4:17 pm, the President released a video message in which he asked the insurrectionists to go home, and told them that he loved them.
And that, in brief, is the executive summary of the January 6 Commission Report, which concludes that “the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump.”
DISPATCH
The seat of national power, Kyiv was the main prize. Thus the thrust by elite airborne forces in the war’s opening hours.
When President Vladimir Putin launched his war on Feb. 24 after months of buildup on Ukraine’s borders, he sent hundreds of helicopter-borne commandos – the best of the best of Russia’s “spetsnaz” (special forces soldiers) – to assault and seize a lightly defended airfield on Kyiv’s doorstep.
On the first morning of the war, Russian Mi-8 assault helicopters soared south toward Kyiv on a mission to attack Hostomel airfield on the northwest outskirts of the capital. By capturing the airfield, also known as Antonov airport, the Russians planned to establish a base from which to fly in more troops and light armored vehicles within striking distance of the heart of the nation’s largest city. It didn’t work that way. Several Russian helicopters were reported to be hit by missiles even before they got to Hostomel, and once settled in at the airfield they suffered heavy losses from artillery fire.
The fact that the Hostomel assault by the Russian 45th Guards Special Purpose Airborne Brigade faltered might not stand out in retrospect if the broader Russian effort had improved from that point. But it did not. ... Last week the Russians abandoned Hostomel airfield as part of a wholesale retreat into Belarus and Russia.
An effort to take control of a military airbase in Vasylkiv south of Kyiv also met stiff resistance and reportedly saw several Russian Il-76 heavy-lift transport planes carrying paratroopers downed by Ukrainian defenses.
A sidelight of the battle for Kyiv was the widely reported saga of a Russian resupply convoy that stretched dozens of miles along a main roadway toward the capital. It initially seemed to be a worrisome sign for the Ukrainians, but they managed to attack elements of the convoy, which had limited off-road capability and thus eventually dispersed or otherwise became a non-factor in the fight. “They never really provided a resupply of any value to Russian forces that were assembling around Kyiv, never really came to their aid,” said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. “The Ukrainians put a stop to that convoy pretty quickly by being very nimble, knocking out bridges, hitting lead vehicles and stopping their movement.” Using a wide array of Western arms, including Javelin portable anti-tank weapons, shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and much more.
“That’s a really bad combination if you want to conquer a country,” said Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel and professor of military history at Ohio State University. “[The Russian Army]’s proven itself to be wholly incapable of conducting modern armored warfare”. ... Some analysts did question whether Putin appreciated how much Ukraine’s forces had gained from Western training that intensified after Putin’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and incursion into the Donbas.
“It’s stunning,” said military historian Frederick Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War, who says he knows of no parallel to a major military power like Russia invading a country at the time of its choosing and failing so utterly. The Russians underestimated the number of troops they would need and showed “an astonishing inability” to perform basic military functions.
Putin failed to achieve his goal of quickly crushing Ukraine’s outgunned and outnumbered army. The Russians were ill-prepared for Ukrainian resistance, proved incapable of adjusting to setbacks, failed to effectively combine air and land operations, misjudged Ukraine’s ability to defend its skies, and bungled basic military functions like planning and executing the movement of supplies.
TIMELINE
BY THE FIRST WEEK of November 1918, the first world war was drawing to a close. When it began, in August 1914, both sides confidently predicted they would be victorious “before the autumn leaves fell from the trees”. Instead, the war turned into a four-year deadlock. It was the Germans who broke first. The United States had belatedly entered the war in 1917, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1918 that the hastily-trained doughboys, armed largely with French weapons, began arriving in significant numbers. It was enough to break the spine of the exhausted German Army, and by September 1918 the Kaiser’s troops were in retreat everywhere, and the Kaiser himself was forced to abdicate by a rebellion of the war-weary German population.
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November 11 1918, the last day of World War One
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At 5 am the French, British, American and German representatives signed the armistice treaty that formally ended hostilities in World War One. Under the terms of the Armistice, the war would officially end at 11 am that morning. All the troops in the trenches had to do was sit tight for the next six hours. Instead, allied forces continued to launch a series of attacks, producing over 10,000 casualties on the last morning of a war that was already over.
0510
At 5:10 am on November 11, the instrument of surrender was signed. To give everyone enough time to contact all their forces in the field, it was agreed that the formal end of hostilities would occur at 11 am that morning.
An hour earlier, at 4 am, the Fifth Marine Division was ordered to cross the Meuse River on pontoon bridges, and came under artillery and MG fire. The Marines took over 1,100 casualties.
The US Army’s 89th Division was ordered to storm the town of Stenay because, the commander later explained, it had a number of bath-houses and he didn’t want the Germans to have them after the war was over. It cost the Americans 61 dead and 304 wounded to take Stenay.
The 92nd Division, an African-American unit with white officers, had been scheduled for days to make an attack on the morning of the 11th. The result was, General John Sherburne bitterly declared, “an absolutely needless waste of life”.
0600
Although the allied forces had known for the past three days that an armistice was being discussed and the war was almost over, it wasn’t until 6 am that official instructions went out declaring that the war would formally end at 11 am. Foch had picked that time, as it was poetically the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
0930
Irishman Private George Edwin Elison, who had helped defend Mons from the Germans back in 1914, now became the last British soldier killed. It was 9:30 am.
1040
At 10:40 am, in the 81st Division, the commanding officer ordered his men to stand down; his superior countermanded that order and told the men to advance. The division lost 66 killed and 395 wounded.
1044
At 10:44 am, the 313th Regiment was ordered to clear out a German MG post at the village of Ville-Devant-Chaumont. As the American troops advanced, the Germans, in utter disbelief, first waved at them frantically, then fired over their heads to try to get them to stop, and finally in desperation fired a short burst directly at them. Private Henry Gunter, who had arrived in the trenches four months ago, was struck in the head and died instantly. He was the last American killed in the war. The time was 10:59 am.
1058
Meanwhile, the attack on Mons continued. At 10:58 am, Canadian trooper Private George Price became the last soldier of the British Commonwealth to be killed.
At 11 am, a German junior officer named Tomas left his trench and approached a group of American troopers in No Man’s Land. As Tomas came forward, they shot him. It was 11:02 am. The cost on the last day of World War One was over 10,000 casualties, wounded or killed: 1200 French; 2400 British; 3000 Americans; 4100 Germans.
ON the 18th and 19th of November the [Russia and Austria] army advanced two days’ march, and the [French] enemy’s outposts after a brief interchange of shots retreated. In the highest army circles from midday on the 19th a great, excitedly bustling activity began which lasted till the morning of the 20th, when the memorable battle of Austerlitz was fought.
UNTIL midday on the 19th the activity, the eager talk, running to and fro, and dispatching of adjutants, was confined to the Emperor’s headquarters (i.e., Alexander I of Russia). But on the afternoon of that day this activity reached [General of the Russian Army] Kutuzov’s headquarters and the staffs of the commanders of columns. By evening the adjutants had spread it to all ends and parts of the army, and in the night from the 19th to the 20th the whole eighty thousand allied troops rose from their bivouacs to the hum of voices, and the army swayed and started in one enormous mass six miles long.
THE concentrated activity which had begun at the Emperor’s headquarters in the morning and had started the whole movement that followed, was like the first movement of the main wheel of a large tower-clock. One wheel slowly moved, another was set in motion, and a third, and wheels began to revolve faster and faster, levers and cog-wheels to work, chimes to play, figures to pop out, and the hands to advance with regular motion as a result of all that activity.
JUST as in the mechanism of a clock, so in the mechanism of the military machine, an impulse once given leads to the final result; and just as indifferently quiescent till the moment when motion is transmitted to them are the parts of the mechanism which the impulse has not yet reached. Wheels creak on their axles as the cogs engage one another and the revolving pulleys whirr with the rapidity of their movement, but a neighbouring wheel is as quiet and motionless as though it were prepared to remain so for a hundred years; but the moment comes when the lever catches it, and obeying the impulse that wheel begins to creak, and joins in the common motion the result and aim of which are beyond its ken.
JUST as in a clock the result of the complicated motion of innumerable wheels and pulleys is merely a slow and regular movement of the hands which show the time, so the result of all the complicated human activities of 160,000 Russians and French – all their passions, desires, remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm – was only the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called battle of the three Emperors – that is to say, a slow movement of the hand on the dial of human history.
THREAD & THRUM
Small space objects entering Earth’s gravitation are, first and foremost, a potentially dangerous “near-Earth object”.
Whenever such a visitor buzzes Earth, it becomes a (passing) meteoroid – it can free itself and continue its course. It’s a meteor if it cannot. And a meteorite, when it has crash landed.
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It took a while to pin down what an asteroid is. The space rocks that make up the Asteroid Belt is a collection that contains more than asteroids. After much discussions, an asteroid these days is understood to be a space rock that can come in a various shapes, a width of from about half-a-mile (one kilometer) to about 600 miles (1000 kilometers); something irregular and smaller than the Moon. An asteroid lacks an electro-magnetic core and carries no atmospher.
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A space object with a tail (made of gas and dust) is a comet. There are different kinds; some can even come from other solar systems.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is a vastness beyond the inner solar system, enlarging by extraordinary magnitudes the sway of the Sun. Just beyond Neptune is a laboratory, in the guise of a cemetery likened to the Asteroid Belt, where objects in resonance to the Sun roam. Just beyond Neptune lies a formidable ring of iced rocks in relatively stable orbits, called the Kuiper Belt (1992), named for Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper (b.1905). Posited, ever since the 1930s, as debris and therefore a part of the solar system, the first evidence surfaced when Albion (1992), mythological Britain, stepped into view: the first Kuiper Belt object ‐ half a mile (167 kilometers) wide, and taking 289 years to go around the Sun.
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The Sun has a third ring, an odd sector where trans-Neptune objects orbit in resonance with Neptune’s gravitational heft, the Scattered Disc (1966).
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In 1907, astronomy began imagining a region in the hinterlands of the outer solar system, a “reservoir of comets”, and where iced remnants from the formation of the early solar system continue living a half-life. In 1932, it began probable. By mid-century, a map of what it may look like was begun. Named after Estonian astrophysicist Ernst Öpik (b.1893) and Dutch astronomer Jan Oort (b.1900), the Öpik-Oort Cloud (1950).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The third minor planet from the Kuiper Belt, carrying two moons as well as a ring a ring, is a “collisional family”, and one day the trinary system will destroy each other. Haumea (2004) is an elongated sphere devoid of methane and bright as snow. A day for the Hawai‘ian childbirth goddess is over with in 3.9 hours, yet she spends 285.5 years going around the Sun. Daughter Hi‘iaka 120 miles wide and makes an orbit every 50 days. Nāmaka, the smaller moon-daughter, is swaddled in iced water.
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The twin sister to Mars is a tNo with an oblong 558-year-long orbit around the Sun, appearing out of the Scattered Disc and using Pluto, or Neptune, to swing around and go home, Eris (2005) is a large minor planet, 1,500 miles (2414 kilometers) wide, and capacious enough to stuff the entire Asteroid Belt in her ice-reflecting frozen-methane planet-sized mantle.
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Telescopes scanning beyond the Kuiper Belt came across a very distant object orbiting the Sun, and the first confirmation of a vast backyard beyond the outer solar system. Named for a migratory Pacific Ocean bird, Leleākūhonua (2015) is a tNo with an orbit so extreme as to also spend some a bit of time in the Kuiper Belt, and the rest of it travelling back to the Öpik-Oort Cloud.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
“Our last arrow! We’ll fire it to stop the getaway car – then end our careers as Green Arrow and Speedy!” “Yes, with our secret identities exposed, we’re uselss against criminals!”
Immortal Dane Whitman brought his time-tested skills as the Black Knight to the early days of filmmaking, creating a phantasmagorical chariot race for Fritz Lang’s 1929 silent scifi Woman in the Moon. These days, he still does stunts for Hollywood.
Although he owns a Legion flight ring from the 30th century, when not in a hurry to get somewhere Michael Jon Carter prefers to drive. He comes from the future, sheathed in a super-suit boasting futuristic tech, but the feel of rubber on road gives Booster Gold a jolt unlike any other.
Little is known about this shapeshifting foe of Batman Beyond. Her fluid body allows Inque to seep into and out of her liquid limo.
Jimon Kwan’s car is parked behind the world’s first eco-fire station. She’s there to give a demonstration – in her capacity as Silver of China Force – on her mutant ability to drain heat and then convert it into light.
Before he went to war as the Fighting American, Nelson Flagg’s father gave him a 1915 Ford Speedster – it later crashed and burned. The original is also shown, fresh off the assembly line.
It takes two of Jamie Madrox, the Multiple Man, to control this wide jeep because it’s sure-as-hell gonna be a bumpy ride.
The grandfather and great-grandfather of James Jesse were from the world of vaudeville, which is why their spawn continued their forays into self-powered locomotion and built a portable air-cooled engine, hooked up to an accelerator switch, an engine cut-off switch, and single-horsepowered roller skates, and later tormenting the Flash w/ weaponized toys as the Trickster.
An inside-out refrigerated truck driven by Leonard Snart, commiting crime as Captain Cold using an experimental gun based on stolen science and shooting absolute-zero blasts that solidify as ice.
H.G. Wells jumped at the chance to take a spin in an experimental contraption that his American friend and fellow futurist, the head of Stark Industries, brought over to London. The author of The Invisible Man is photographed sitting in the back seat as the self-driving car crosses Tower Bridge.
This tasty USSR-era Trabant was on display in a Belgrade art gallery when Harlequin, the “merry menace”, happened by, took one look, and promptly brought it home.
This rarely seen Bugatti Type 57 Atlantic belongs to Arthur Curry (Aquaman) and is nicknamed the Drop because he almost never has need for it.
Even super-heroes driving sports cars have to stop and pay toll, as the Thing heckles Johnny Storm’s tossing chops. “Let’s get going, Torchy! Hey! Ya missed the coin bucket!” “But I threw it okay! It wasn’t my fault! The bucket moved!”
After punching Hitler in his debut, the city of Manhattan awarded Steve Rogers w/ a spanking red 1937 Ford, and he promptly took off to drive cross-country. Then he made up for lost years w/ a Corvette. These days, his ride is a 1960 Chevrolet, always parked on the street; repeatedly stolen then returned because it was a badge of honor to leave the keys in the ignition.
Before his life was imbued w/ Bahdnisian powers and he took control of the human thunderbolt, Johnny Thunder was in Europe, having won a music scholarship while in high school. With some of his prize money he bought a second-hand Minor Morris convertible.
Bentley Wittman, narrowly escaping the Human Torch, is chauffeured back to his mansion on Long Island and his life as the Wizard. “Fire is a powerful weapon! But I possess the greatest weapon of all – the world’s greatest brain!”
No way is the mysterious Dolphin a landlubber, so whenever adventures take her ashore she always rides in her 1962 Shark roadster, w/ its aquarium pod and other aquatic must-haves allowing her safe passage.
Retiring as the Sorcerer Supreme, Steven Strange’s mentor, the Ancient One, master of mystic arts, drove home to Kamar-Taj in Tibet, crossing rivers w/ the aid of local villagers, ever grateful for deliverance from the evil Kaluu.
Suddenly, the hovering air-car is jolted by a fantastic wave of force … and that is when Nick Fury sees an awesome figure who stands waiting to confront the dynamic director of SHIELD …
A surreal episode of the Knights of the Galaxy is just starting. “For King Arthur and Britain.” (Mystery In Space #8 (June-July 1952))
To have a bit of fun while Superman is recovering from their latest encounter, Mr Mxyzptlk, the imp from elsewhere, uses fifth-dimensional science to rearrange this car and proceeds to demonstrate how to operate it.
Vic Sage blends into his camouflage car, ephemeral behind a pseudoderm mask, during the time he joined Blue Beetle, Captain Atom and Nightshade as the Question in the original Sentinels of Justice.
When insect-female hybrid Queen Zazzala of planet Korll returned for a rematch w/ the Justic League, she went first to the Citroen museum in Aulnay-sous-Bois near Paris, and took possession of an experimental 1940s light-weight hovercar which she used as a beehive-nest. Badly damaged and abandoned, it still oscillates when touched, awaiting new instructions from the Queen Bee.
The nomadic Roy Harper, leaving behind his Speedy persona, took to the road in an oft-vandalized therefore oft-disguised van. When he landed in England, the former battling bowman persuaded Banksy to let him take the famous SWAT van for an extended spin as Arsenal.
Random page from the mid-century portfolio of billionaire industrialist Tony Stark: 1958 Nucleon, Norman Bel Geddes prototype, 1949 Tabot Iago, 1959 Firebird.
Sue Richards fetched Agatha Harkness, her boy Franklin’s new governess, in a custom-built Hispano-Suiza, previously owned by an heir to the Dubonnet fortune. It was a regal ride befitting the lead-witch of New Salem, who has brought along a mystical rocking seahorse as a baby present.
An early electric car prototype from the morbid mind of Oswald Hubert Loomis, aka the Prankster.
When her mom asked if her new car was safe, Jennifer Walters sent this blurry pix of her unusual find while in college. It proved ideal for camping, and that was when she got into an accident, needed a blood transfusion from her cousin Bruce, and began a new existence as the ravishing rough She-Hulk.
In 1923, Tony Stark’s dad visited the Fiat Factory in Turin and openly admired their roof treatment. When what later became the Avengers Mansion was built, he put a race-car track on the roof.
Besides lending his occult skills to combat evil, Giovanni Zatara performs as a stage magician, and is the reason he drives a 1959 Lincoln, which has a sturdy trunk to fit all his stage props.
Tony Stark awarded his executive assistant Pepper Potts w/ this pink 1954 Ford in recognition for her aid in their first caper together, battling “The Mad Pharaoh”.
Kent Allard’s elusive 1957 Lincoln Premiere, which he drove as the Shadow, caught on a U.S. postage stamp.
Blackhawk’s 1949 Hudson, later owned by Jack Kerouac when he was doing a lot of driving. Restored and no longer driven.
Carter Hall was so smitten when Hal Jordan drove up in a Phantom Corsair that the test-pilot promptly gifted this one-off automobile to the extraterrestrial detective, known to Earth as the Hawkman, for a planet-warming present.
Although a haunted horse accompanies his cursed existence, the ghost of highwayman James Craddock also owns a train, breaking the law as the Gentleman Ghost, and traveling the world w/ out a home.
Long after the owner of Gotham Broadcasting Co. Alan Welling Scott, was visited by the Green Flame of Life (“Three times shall I flame green! First to bring death! Second to bring life! Third to bring power!”) and fought evildoers as the Green Lantern, he would continue to tool around in his trusted 1939 Chevrolet clunker.
Prof. X’s band of super-human teenagers are driven to the airport in a specially-built Rolls Royce w/ dark-tinted windows. “Boy! It musta taken a heap of green stamps to buy a chariot like this!” “No joking, please! Concentrate on your mission! Review your powers! Our foe is certain to be highly dangerous!”
Brainiac 5 retooled an antique and created the “frisbee”, armed w/ repel-rays, as a combat suit for Chuck Taine, the Bouncing Boy.
Hooking up to his Plymouth Barracuda’s batteries to recharge his pyro-costume, Garfield Lynns unleashes a color crimewave based on rainbow rays as the Human Firefly.
Ted Grant’s ride when he’s fighting crime as Wildcat, immortalized on a U.S. postage stamp.
Brainiac 5 constructed this bi-cycle for Luornu Durgo Taine (Duo Damsel) to augment her super-power.
With wealth to spare, socialite Wesley Dodds had a taste for danger and cars. Which is why he could imperil his 1935 Bugatti Aerolithe by taking it out to strike terror among wrongdoers as the Sandman, declaring “There is no land beyond the law, where tyrants rule w/ unshakable power! It’s but a dream from which the evil wake to face their fate … their terrifying hour!”
A gift from Brainiac 5, this experimental bike allowed Lana Lang to apply 30th-century technology to her 20th-century life. While fiddling around w/ the teleportation button during a ride in the countryside, she managed to trade bodies w/ all the insects in a nearby field, becoming for a spell the Insect Queen.
Socialite Kathy Kane, in her first appearance as a masked crimefighter, leading the Batmobile into the fray on her Bat Bike. “Hurry, Batman – the Batwoman is beating us on this mission!” (Detective Comics #233 July 1956)
The keys to this experimental car from Stark Industries were handed to Matt Murdock, giving added comfort to his forays as Daredevil into existential evil.
Samuel Joseph Scudder drove this solar laboratory on wheels in his first appearance in Flash #105, “The Master of Mirrors”.
This innocuous van offers storage for Rory Regan’s collection of mystical rags, allowing Ragman, the tatterdemalion of justice, to find respite after a jolt of electricity ran into his body and which by all accounts hasn’t exited yet.
The second Shield, Lancelot Strong, drove a 1970 AMC Rebel for a short period until its color scheme gave him away to every bad actor on every city block.
Model kit from Aurora for Britt Reid’s special-built 1965 Chrysler, featuring a 413 engine. Bruce Lee as Kato drove the Black Beauty to fight crime w/ the Green Hornet, ever ready to deploy a pair of hood-mounted machine guns, a flame thrower, and stinger missles.
Sowing feline felony in Gotham City w/ her Cat Mobile, Selina Kyle leads a lawless life as the Catwoman.
Winslow Schott, the terrible Toyman, had his fully functional dwarf Cadillac surrounded by indignant townfolk hoping to save Doll Man and Doll Girl from a threat they were not yet aware of.
The seldom driven Joker Mobile is deployed to track down a double-crossing mobster. “The whole job – the safe-cracking, the getaway - all bear the stamp of Dink Devers! The cops think he died – but he’s right here in town, at the Blake Hotel! Ha-HA-HA!” “Gosh, Joker – I bet you’re right!”
A proficiency in auto mechanics as well as miniaturization landed Ray Palmer a plum position as a team member rehabilitating a Ferrari 375 Plus. Palmer kept tinkering some more on the racing car, giving it a capability of being shrunk, and constitutes the first step in his quest, as the Atom, to jump into, then out of, the quantum realm at will.
While parked on a cloud, the Ghost Patrol are actively bored ... “Ho Hum! Another quiet day. Nothing doing on our sector of earth lately.” “Strange! This is usually the most troublesome of the planets!” “What’s that ahead? Why – it’s a horse!”
King T’challa of Wakanda’s elusive jeep parked in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, where he was on a secret mission as the Black Panther.
This “fire” truck, designed by Stark Industries, later patented by General Motors as the Futurliner, was used to house JIm Hammond, an android spawned in the mind of Prof. Phineas T. Horton. This lab-on wheels is remotely controlled, insulated inside to withstand the intense fire generated by the golden age Human Torch.
Immortal Dane Whitman brought his time-tested skills as the 
Although he owns a Legion flight ring from the 30th century, when not in a hurry to get somewhere Michael Jon Carter prefers to drive. He comes from the future, sheathed in a super-suit boasting futuristic tech, but the feel of rubber on road gives 
Little is known about this shapeshifting foe of Batman Beyond. Her fluid body allows 
Jimon Kwan’s car is parked behind the world’s first eco-fire station. She’s there to give a demonstration – in her capacity as 
Before he went to war as the 
It takes two of Jamie Madrox, the 
The grandfather and great-grandfather of James Jesse were from the world of vaudeville, which is why their spawn continued their forays into self-powered locomotion and built a portable air-cooled engine, hooked up to an accelerator switch, an engine cut-off switch, and single-horsepowered roller skates, and later tormenting the Flash w/ weaponized toys as the 
An inside-out refrigerated truck driven by Leonard Snart, commiting crime as 
H.G. Wells jumped at the chance to take a spin in an experimental contraption that his American friend and fellow futurist, the head of 
This tasty USSR-era Trabant was on display in a Belgrade art gallery when 
This rarely seen Bugatti Type 57 Atlantic belongs to Arthur Curry (Aquaman) and is nicknamed the Drop because he almost never has need for it.
Even super-heroes driving sports cars have to stop and pay toll, as the Thing heckles 
After punching Hitler in his debut, the city of Manhattan awarded Steve Rogers w/ a spanking red 1937 Ford, and he promptly took off to drive cross-country. Then 
Before his life was imbued w/ Bahdnisian powers and he took control of the human thunderbolt, 
Bentley Wittman, narrowly escaping the Human Torch, is chauffeured back to his mansion on Long Island and his life as the 
No way is the mysterious 
Suddenly, the hovering air-car is jolted by a fantastic wave of force … and that is when 
A surreal episode of the 
To have a bit of fun while Superman is recovering from their latest encounter, Mr Mxyzptlk, the imp from elsewhere, uses 
Vic Sage blends into his camouflage car, ephemeral behind a pseudoderm mask, during the time he joined Blue Beetle, Captain Atom and Nightshade as the 
When insect-female hybrid Queen Zazzala of planet Korll returned for a rematch w/ the Justic League, she went first to the Citroen museum in Aulnay-sous-Bois near Paris, and took possession of an experimental 1940s light-weight hovercar which she used as a beehive-nest. Badly damaged and abandoned, it still oscillates when touched, awaiting new instructions from the 
The nomadic Roy Harper, leaving behind his Speedy persona, took to the road in an oft-vandalized therefore oft-disguised van. When he landed in England, the former battling bowman persuaded Banksy to let him take the famous SWAT van for an extended spin as 
Random page from the mid-century portfolio of billionaire industrialist 
Sue Richards fetched Agatha Harkness, her boy Franklin’s new governess, in a custom-built Hispano-Suiza, previously owned by an heir to the Dubonnet fortune. It was a regal ride befitting the 
An early electric car prototype from the morbid mind of Oswald Hubert Loomis, aka the 
When her mom asked if her new car was safe, Jennifer Walters sent this blurry pix of her unusual find while in college. It proved ideal for camping, and that was when she got into an accident, needed a blood transfusion from her cousin Bruce, and began a new existence as the ravishing rough 
In 1923, Tony Stark’s dad visited the Fiat Factory in Turin and openly admired their roof treatment. When what later became the 
Besides lending his occult skills to combat evil, 
Tony Stark awarded his executive assistant 
Kent Allard’s elusive 1957 Lincoln Premiere, which he drove as the 
Carter Hall was so smitten when Hal Jordan drove up in a Phantom Corsair that the test-pilot promptly gifted this one-off automobile to the extraterrestrial detective, known to Earth as the 
An experimental floating fortress from the malevolent minds at 
Although a haunted horse accompanies his cursed existence, the ghost of highwayman James Craddock also owns a train, breaking the law as the 
Long after the owner of Gotham Broadcasting Co. Alan Welling Scott, was visited by the Green Flame of Life (“Three times shall I flame green! First to bring death! Second to bring life! Third to bring power!”) and fought evildoers as the 
Brainiac 5 retooled an antique and created the “frisbee”, armed w/ repel-rays, as a combat suit for Chuck Taine, the 
Hooking up to his Plymouth Barracuda’s batteries to recharge his pyro-costume, Garfield Lynns unleashes a color crimewave based on rainbow rays as the 
Ted Grant’s ride when he’s fighting crime as 
Brainiac 5 constructed this bi-cycle for Luornu Durgo Taine (
With wealth to spare, socialite Wesley Dodds had a taste for danger and cars. Which is why he could imperil his 1935 Bugatti Aerolithe by taking it out to strike terror among wrongdoers as the 
A gift from Brainiac 5, this experimental bike allowed Lana Lang to apply 30th-century technology to her 20th-century life. While fiddling around w/ the teleportation button during a ride in the countryside, she managed to trade bodies w/ all the insects in a nearby field, becoming for a spell the 
Socialite Kathy Kane, in her first appearance as a masked crimefighter, leading the Batmobile into the fray on her Bat Bike. “Hurry, Batman – the 
The keys to this experimental car from Stark Industries were handed to Matt Murdock, giving added comfort to his forays as 
Samuel Joseph Scudder drove this solar laboratory on wheels in his first appearance in Flash #105, “
This innocuous van offers storage for Rory Regan’s collection of mystical rags, allowing 
Model kit from Aurora for Britt Reid’s special-built 1965 Chrysler, featuring a 413 engine. Bruce Lee as Kato drove the Black Beauty to fight crime w/ the 
Sowing feline felony in Gotham City w/ her Cat Mobile, Selina Kyle leads a lawless life as the 
Winslow Schott, the terrible 
The seldom driven Joker Mobile is deployed to track down a double-crossing mobster. “The whole job – the safe-cracking, the getaway - all bear the stamp of Dink Devers! The cops think he died – but he’s right here in town, at the Blake Hotel! Ha-HA-HA!” “Gosh, 
A proficiency in auto mechanics as well as miniaturization landed Ray Palmer a plum position as a team member rehabilitating a Ferrari 375 Plus. Palmer kept tinkering some more on the racing car, giving it a capability of being shrunk, and constitutes the first step in his quest, as the 
While parked on a cloud, the 
King T’challa of Wakanda’s elusive jeep parked in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, where he was on a secret mission as the 
This “fire” truck, designed by Stark Industries, later patented by General Motors as the Futurliner, was used to house JIm Hammond, an android spawned in the mind of Prof. Phineas T. Horton. This lab-on wheels is remotely controlled, insulated inside to withstand the intense fire generated by the golden age