PIXELS 
Skylight inside the College of Mining, UC Berkeley
  • College of Mining (1907), University of Berkeley.


  LEFT COAST ART 
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San Francisco Sex Workers contingent in Los Angeles’s 2008 Dyke March.

Save Music in Chinatown (2018): Michelle Carr (6.3.2021), Lois (that is her stage name), Allison Wolf (4.18.2017), Phranc (disco­gra­phy), Alice Bag (9.17.2017).

| Judy Sisneros

Photographer and con­tributor to “LA Beat”, one of several ven­ues docu­ment­ing “the vibrant art and music scene that makes Los Ange­les such an amaz­ing city to live in to­day.
EZ Tiger, Fea, and Pansy Division, Viper Room 11.12.2016. Photos by Judy Sisneros
I first met Judy Ornelas Sisneros at a punk rock show in 1970s San Fran­cis­co, clad in black behind lip­stick red leath­er gloves.



Rex Ray (b.1956) laid out classic looks for High Risk Books. It was now then, and now now.
Front cover

| Rex Ray

Backcover. Le Figaro: [A book about] the essence of the world; the dark beauty. A book of panic, book of irony. A book of testament, of prayer and punishment. Front and back­cover, “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life” (1994) by Hervé Guibert, set in HIV-Paris.




Outdoor seating by Michael Arcega (b.1973), “Aus­pi­cious Clouds | Heavy Fog” (2018), on Broad­way between Pow­ell and Colum­bus, pos­ing as mono-hued sculp­tures.

| Michael Arcega




 CANNON FODDER 

 ATTACK ON HOSTOMEL 
Putin sits in front of wall-size map of Russia.

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.


 TRACED CALLS  Mom, there was a battle.
The Associated Press pub­lished calls made in March 2022 by three Rus­sian sol­diers, Leonid, Maxim and Ivan, in a mili­tary divi­sion near Bucha, a town outside Kyiv that wit­nessed the first atroc­i­ties of the War on Ukraine. (The Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment had been inter­cept­ing Rus­sian calls when their phones ping Ukrain­ian cell towers, pro­vid­ing im­por­tant real-time intel­li­gence for the mili­tary. Now, the calls are al­so poten­tial evi­dence for war crimes.)

Leonid: First, he was shot in his leg. Then his ears were cut off.

Leonid Phone Call #1:
Leonid’s intro­duc­tion to war came on Feb. 24, as his unit crossed into Ukraine from Bela­rus and deci­mat­ed a detach­ment of Ukrain­ians at the bor­der. mother: “When did you get scared?” leonid: “When our com­mand­er warned us we would be shot, 100%. He warned us that al­though we’d be bombed and shot at, our aim was to get through.” mother: “Did they shoot you?” leonid: “Of course. We defeat­ed them.” mother: “Mm. Did you shoot from your tanks?” leonid: “Yeah, we did. We shot from the tanks, machine guns and rifles. We had no losses. We des­troyed their four tanks. There were dead bodies ly­ing around and burn­ing. So, we won.” mother: “Oh what a night­mare! Lyon­ka, you want­ed to live at that mo­ment, right honey?” leonid: “More than ever!” mother: “More than ever, right honey?” leonid: “Of course.” mother: “It’s total­ly hor­ri­ble.” leonid: “They were ly­ing there, just 18- or 19-years old. Am I dif­fer­ent from them? No, I’m not.”

Leonid Phone Call #2:
Leonid tells his moth­er their plan was to seize Kyiv with­in a week, with­out fir­ing a single bul­let. “It was so con­fus­ing,” he says. “They were well pre­pared.” When Leo­nid tells his moth­er cas­ual­ly about loot­ing, at first she can’t be­lieve he’s steal­ing. But it’s be­come nor­mal for him. As he speaks, he watches a town burn on the hori­zon. “Such a beau­ty,” he says. leonid: “Look, Mom, I’m look­ing at tons of houses – I don’t know, doz­ens, hun­dreds – and they’re all emp­ty. Every­one ran away.” mother: “So all the peo­ple left, right? You guys aren’t loot­ing them, are you? You’re not go­ing in­to oth­er people’s houses?” leonid: “Of course we are, Mom. Are you crazy?” mother: “Oh, you are. What do you take from there?” leonid: “We take food, bed lin­en, pil­lows. Blan­kets, forks, spoons, pans.” mother: (Laughing) “You got­ta be kid­ding me.” leonid: “Who­ever doesn’t have any – socks, clean under­wear, T-shirts, sweat­ers.”

Leonid Phone Call #3:
Leo­nid tells his moth­er about the ter­ror of go­ing on patrol and not know­ing what or who they will en­coun­ter. mother: “Oh Lyon­ka, you’ve seen so much stuff there!” leonid: “Well ... civil­ians are lying around right on the street with their brains com­ing out.” mother: “Oh God, you mean the locals?” leonid: “Yep. Well, like, yeah.” mother: “Are they the ones you guys shot or the ones ...” leonid: “The ones killed by our army.” mother: “Lyon­ya, they might just be peace­ful people.” leonid: “Mom, there was a bat­tle. And a guy would just pop up, you know? Maybe he would pull out a gre­nade launch­er ... Or we had a case, a young guy was stopped, they took his cell­phone. He had all this infor­ma­tion about us in his Tele­gram mes­sages – where to bomb, how many we were, how many tanks we have. And that’s it.” mother: “So they knew every­thing?” leonid: “He was shot right there on the spot.” mother: “Mm.” leonid: “He was 17-years old. And that’s it, right there.” mother: “Mm.” leonid: “There was a pris­on­er. It was an 18-year-old guy. First, he was shot in his leg. Then his ears were cut off. After that, he ad­mit­ted every­thing, and they killed him.” mother: “Did he ad­mit it?” leonid: “We don’t im­pris­on them. I mean, we kill them all.” mother: “Mm.”

Leonid Phone Call #4:
Leonid tells his moth­er he was near­ly killed five times. Things are so dis­or­gan­ized, he says, that it’s not un­com­mon for Rus­sians to fire on their own troops – it even hap­pened to him. Some sol­diers shoot them­selves just to get medi­cal leave, he says. mother: “Hel­lo, Lyon­ech­ka.” leonid: “I just want­ed to call you again. I am able to speak.” mother: “Oh, that’s good.” leonid: “There are peo­ple out here who shoot them­selves.” mother: “Mm.” leonid: “They do it for the insur­ance money. You know where they shoot them­selves?” mother: “That’s sil­ly, Lyon­ya.” leonid: “The bot­tom part of the left thigh.” mother: “It’s bull–, Lyon­ya. They’re crazy, you know that, right?” leonid: “Some people are so scared that they are ready to harm them­selves just to leave.” mother: “Yeah, it is fear, what can you say here, it’s human fear. Every­body wants to live. I don’t argue with that, but please don’t do that. We all pray for you. You should cross your­self any chance you get, just turn away from every­one and do it. We all pray for you. We’re all wor­ried.” leonid: “I’m stand­ing here, and you know what the sit­u­a­tion is? I am now 30 meters (100 feet) away from a huge ceme­tery.” (Giggling) mother: “Oh, that’s hor­ri­ble ... may it be over soon.” Leo­nid says he had to learn to emp­ty his mind. “Imagine, it’s night­time. You’re sit­ting in the dark and it’s quiet out there. Alone with your thoughts. And day after day, you sit there alone with those thoughts.” He tells his girl­friend: “I al­ready learned to think of noth­ing while sit­ting out­side.” He prom­ises to bring home a col­lec­tion of bul­lets for the kids. “Tro­phies from Ukraine,” he calls them. His moth­er says she’s wait­ing for him. “Of course I’ll come, why wouldn’t I?” Leo­nid says. “Of course, you’ll come,” his moth­er says. “No doubts. You’re my be­loved. Of course, you’ll come. You are my hap­pi­ness.” Leo­nid re­turned to Rus­sia in May, badly wound­ed, but alive. He told his moth­er Rus­sia would win this war.

Maxim: Because they can also be fucking spotters.

Maxim Phone Call #1:
It’s not clear what mili­tary unit Max­im is in, but he makes calls from the same phone as Ivan, on the same days. The hunt for locals –men, wom­en and chil­dren – who might be in­form­ing on them to the Ukrain­ian mili­tary is con­stant. Max­im is drunk in some of the calls, slur­ring his words, be­cause life at the front line is more than he can take sober. The on­ly rea­son Max­im is able to speak with his fam­ily back in Rus­sia is be­cause they’ve been steal­ing phones from locals. He says they’re even shak­ing down kids. “We take every­thing from them,” he ex­plains to his wife. “Be­cause they can also be f– spot­ters.” On calls home, the high sweet voice of Max­im’s own young child bub­bles in the back­ground as he talks with his wife. maxim: “Do you know how much a gram of gold costs here?” wife: “No.” maxim: “Rough­ly? About two or three thou­sand rubles, right?” wife: “Well, yeah ...” maxim: “Well, I have 1½ kilo­grams (more than three pounds). With labels even.” wife: “Holy f–, are we loot­ers?!” maxim: “With labels, yeah. It’s just that we f– up this ... We were shoot­ing at this shop­ping mall from a tank. Then we go in, and there’s a f– jewel­ry store. Every­thing was taken. But there was a safe there. We cracked it open, and in­side ... f– me! So the seven of us load­ed up.” wife: “I see.” maxim: “They had these f– neck­laces, you know. In our money, they’re like 30-to-40,000 a piece, 60,000 a piece.” wife: “Holy crap.” maxim: “I scored about a kilo and a half of neck­laces, charms, brace­lets ... these ... ear­rings ... ear­rings with rings ...” wife: “That’s enough, don’t tell me.” maxim: “Any­way, I count­ed and if it’s 3,000 rubles a gram, then I have about 3.5 mil­lion. If you off­load it.” wife: “Got it. How’s the sit­u­a­tion there?” maxim: “It’s f– OK.” wife: “OK? Got it.” maxim: “We don’t have a f– thing to do, so we go around and loot the f– shop­ping mall.” wife: “Just be care­ful, in the name of Christ.”

Maxim Phone Call #2:
Maxim and his moth­er dis­cuss the op­pos­ing stor­ies about the war be­ing told on Ukrain­ian and Rus­sian tele­vision. They blame the United States and re­cite con­spi­racy theo­ries pushed by Rus­sian state media. But Max­im and his moth­er be­lieve it’s the Ukrain­ians who are delud­ed by fake news and prop­a­gan­da, not them. The best way to end the war, his moth­er says, is to kill the pres­i­dents of Ukraine and the United States. Later, Max­im tells his moth­er that thou­sands of Rus­sian troops died in the first weeks of war – so many that there’s no time to do any­thing ex­cept haul away the bodies. That’s not what they’re say­ing on Rus­sian TV, his moth­er says. maxim: “Here, it’s all Ameri­can. All the wea­pons.” mother: “It’s the Ameri­cans driv­ing this, of course! Look at their labo­ra­tories. They are devel­op­ing bio­log­i­cal wea­pons. Coro­na­virus lit­eral­ly start­ed there.” maxim: “Yeah, I al­so saw some­where that they used bats.” mother: “All of it. Bats, migrat­ing birds, and even coro­na­virus might be their bio­log­i­cal wea­pon. They even found all these papers with sig­na­tures from the U.S. all over Ukraine. Biden’s son is the master­mind be­hind all of this. ... When will it end? When they stop sup­ply­ing wea­pons.” maxim: “Mm.” mother: “Un­til they catch (Ukrain­ian Pres­i­dent Volo­dy­myr) Zelen­skyy and exe­cute him, noth­ing will end. He’s a fool, a fool! He’s a pup­pet for the U.S. and they real­ly don’t need him, the fool. You watch TV and you feel bad for the peo­ple, the civil­ians, some trav­el­ling with young kids. ... If I was giv­en a gun, I’d go and shoot Biden.” (Laughs) maxim: (Laughs)

Maxim Phone Call #3:
One night last March, Max­im was hav­ing trou­ble keep­ing it to­geth­er on a call with his wife. He’d been drink­ing, as he did every night. He told her he’d killed civil­ians – so many he thinks he’s go­ing crazy. He said might not make it home alive. He was just sit­ting there, drunk in the dark, wait­ing for the Ukrain­ian artil­lery strikes to start. wife: “Why? Why are you drink­ing?” maxim: “Every­one is like that here. It’s im­pos­si­ble with­out it here.” wife: “How the f– will you pro­tect your­self if you are tipsy?” maxim: “Total­ly nor­mal. On the con­trary, it’s eas­ier to shoot ... civil­ians. Let’s not talk about this. I’ll come back and tell you how it is here and why we drink!” wife: “Please, just be care­ful!” maxim: “Every­thing will be fine. Hon­est­ly, I’m scared s–less my­self. I nev­er saw such hell as here. I am f– shocked.” wife: “Why the f– did you go there?” Minutes later, he’s on the phone with his child. ‘You’re com­ing back?” the child asks. “Of course,” Maxim says.

Maxim Phone Call #4:
In their last inter­cept­ed call, Maxim’s wife seems to have a prem­o­ni­tion. wife: “Is every­thing all right?” maxim: “Yeah. Why?” wife: “Be hon­est with me, is every­thing all right?” maxim: “Huh? Why do you ask?” wife: “It’s noth­ing, I just can’t sleep at night.” Max­im is a lit­tle breath­less. He and his unit are get­ting ready to go. His wife asks him where they’re go­ing. “For­ward, I won’t be able to call for a while.”

Ivan: It is scary, Olya. It really is scary.

Ivan Phone Call #1:
Ivan was in Bela­rus on train­ing when they got a Tele­gram mes­sage: “Tomor­row you are leav­ing for Ukraine. There is a geno­cide of the Rus­sian pop­u­la­tion. And we have to stop it.” When his moth­er found out he was in Ukraine, she said she stopped speak­ing for days and took seda­tives. Her hair went gray. Still, she was proud of him. Ivan end­ed up in Bucha. ivan: “Mom, hi.” mother: “Hi, son! How–” ivan: “How are you?” mother: “Van­ya, I under­stand they might be lis­ten­ing so I’m afraid–” ivan: “Doesn’t mat­ter.” mother: “... to ask where you are, what’s hap­pen­ing. Where are you?” ivan: “In Bucha.” mother: “In Bucha?” ivan: “In Bucha.” mother: “Son, be as care­ful as you can, OK? Don’t go charg­ing around! Al­ways keep a cool head.” ivan: “Oh, come on, I’m not charg­ing around.” mother: “Yeah, right! And yes­ter­day you told me how you’re gon­na f– kill every­one out there.” (Laughs) ivan: “We will kill if we have to.” mother: “Huh?” ivan: “If we have to – we have to.” mother: “I under­stand you. I’m so proud of you, my son! I don’t even know how to put it. I love you so much. And I bless you for every­thing, every­thing! I wish you suc­cess in every­thing. And I’ll wait for you no mat­ter what.”

Ivan Phone Call #2:
Ivan calls his girl­friend, Olya, and tells her he had a dream about her. ivan: “F–, you know, it’s driv­ing me crazy here. It’s just that ... You were just ... I felt you, touched you with my hand. I don’t under­stand how it’s pos­si­ble, why, where ... But I real­ly felt you. I don’t know, I felt some­thing warm, someth­ing dear. It’s like someth­ing was on fire in my hands, so warm ... And that’s it. I don’t know. I was sleep­ing and then I woke up with all these thoughts. War ... You know, when you’re sleep­ing – and then you’re like ... War ... Where, where is it? It was just dark in the house, so dark. And I went out­side, walked around the streets, and thought: damn, f– it. And that’s it. I real­ly want to come see you.” girl­friend: “I am wait­ing for you.” ivan: “Wait­ing? OK. I’m wait­ing, too. Wait­ing for the time I can come see you ... Let’s make a deal. When we see each oth­er, let’s spend the en­tire day to­geth­er. Lay­ing around, sit­ting to­geth­er, eat­ing, look­ing at each oth­er – just us, to­geth­er.” girl­friend: (Laughs) “Agreed.” ivan: “To­geth­er all the time. Hug­ging, cud­dling, kiss­ing ... To­geth­er all the time, not let­ting each oth­er go.” girl­friend: “Well, yeah!” ivan: “You can go f– crazy here. It’s so f– up, the s– that’s hap­pen­ing. I really thought it would be easy here, to tell you the truth. That it’s just gon­na be easy to talk, think about it. But it turned out to be hard, you need to think with your head all the time. So that’s that. We are real­ly at the front line. As far out as you could be. Kyiv is 15 kilo­meters (about 10 miles) from us. It is scary, Olya. It real­ly is scary.” girl­friend: “Hello?” ivan: “Do you hear me?” The line drops.

Ivan Phone Call #3:
As things get worse for Ivan in Ukraine, his moth­er’s patriot­ism deep­ens and her rage grows. mother: “Do you have any pre­dic­tions about the end ...?” ivan: “We are here for the time be­ing. We’ll prob­ably stay until they clean up the whole of Ukraine. May­be they’ll pull us out. May­be not. We’re go­ing for Kyiv.” mother: “What are they go­ing to do?” ivan: “We’re not going any­where until they clean up all of these pests.” mother: “Are those bas­tards get­ting cleaned up?” ivan: “Yes, they are. But they’ve been wait­ing for us and pre­par­ing, you under­stand? Pre­par­ing prop­er­ly. Ameri­can moth­erf– have been help­ing them out.” mother: “F– f–. F– kill them all. You have my bless­ing.” ... Death came for Ivan. In July, a local paper pub­lished a notice of his funer­al with a pho­to of him, again in fatigues hold­ing a large rifle. Ivan died heroic­al­ly in Rus­sia’s “spe­cial mili­tary oper­ation,” the announce­ment said. “We will nev­er for­get you. All of Rus­sia shares this grief.” Reached by the AP in Jan­uary, Ivan’s moth­er at first denied she’d ever talked with her son from the front. But she agreed to lis­ten to some of the inter­cept­ed audio and con­firmed it was her speak­ing with Ivan. “He wasn’t in­volved in mur­ders, let alone in loot­ing,” she told the AP be­fore hang­ing up the phone. Ivan was her on­ly son.


 'THIS MADNESS'  A Russian Soldier's Journal
Forced march to unknown location. Feb. 15 2022
I arrived to the train­ing ground [in Stary Krym, Cri­mea]. Our en­tire squa­dron, about 40 peo­ple, all lived in one tent with plank boards and one make­shift stove. Even in Chech­nya, where we only lived in tents or mud huts, our liv­ing con­di­tions were or­ganized bet­ter. Here we had no­where to wash up and the food was hor­ri­ble. For those who ar­rived later than the rest, me and about five other peo­ple, there was nei­ther a sleep­ing bag, nor camo, armor, or hel­mets left. I final­ly re­ceived my rifle. It turned out that it had a brok­en belt, was rusty and kept get­ting stuck, so I cleaned it in oil for a long time try­ing to put it in order. Around Feb­ruary 20, an order came for every­one to urgent­ly gather and move out, pack­ing light­ly. We were sup­posed to per­form a forced march to some un­known loca­tion. Some peo­ple joked that now we would at­tack Ukraine and cap­ture Kyiv in three days. But al­ready then I thought it is no time for laugh­ter. I said that if some­thing like this were to hap­pen, we would not cap­ture any­thing in three days.

Our salary per day $69. Feb. 23
The division com­mander ar­rived and, con­gra­tu­lat­ing us on the [Defend­er of the Fatherland] holi­day, an­nounced that start­ing from to­mor­row, our salary per day would be $69. It was a clear sign that some­thing serious is about to hap­pen. Rumors be­gan spreading that we are about to go storm Kher­son, which seemed to be non­sense to me. Every­thing changed that day. I no­ticed how peo­ple be­gan to change, some were ner­vous and tried not to com­mu­ni­cate with any­one, some frank­ly seemed scared, some, on the con­trary, were un­usual­ly cheerful.

It's started. Feb. 24
At about 4 a.m. I opened my eyes again and heard a roar, a rum­ble, a vibra­tion of the earth. I sensed an acrid smell of gun­powder in the air. I look out of the truck and see that the sky is lit bright from vol­leys. It was not clear what is hap­pen­ing, who was shoot­ing from where and at whom, but the weari­ness from lack of food, water and sleep dis­ap­peared. A min­ute later, I lit up a cigar­ette to wake up, and real­ized that the fire is com­ing 10-20 kilo­meters ahead of our con­voy. Every­one around me al­so be­gan to wake up and smoke and there was a quiet mur­mur: “It’s start­ed.” We must have a plan. The con­voy be­came ani­mated and start­ed to slow­ly move for­ward. I saw the lights switch on in the houses and peo­ple look­ing out the win­dows and bal­conies of five-story build­ings. It was al­ready dawn, per­haps 6 a.m., the sun went up and I saw a doz­en heli­copters, a doz­en planes, armored as­sault vehi­cles drive across the field. Then tanks ap­peared, hun­dreds of pieces of equip­ment under Rus­sian flags. By 1 p.m. we drove to a huge field where our trucks got bogged down in the mud. I got ner­vous. A huge col­umn stand­ing in the mid­dle of an open field for half an hour is just an ideal tar­get. If the enemy notices us and is near­by, we are f–ed. Many be­gan to climb out of the trucks and smoke, turn­ing to one from an­oth­er. The or­der is to go to Kher­son and capture the bridge across the Dnie­per. I under­stood that some­thing global was hap­pen­ing, but I did not know what exact­ly. Many thoughts were spin­ning in my head. I thought that we couldn’t just at­tack Ukraine, may­be NATO real­ly got in the way and we inter­vened. May­be there are al­so bat­tles go­ing on in Rus­sia, may­be the Ukrain­ians at­tacked to­gether with NATO. May­be there is some­thing go­ing on in the Far East – if Ameri­ca also start­ed a war against us. Then the scale will be huge, and nuclear wea­pons, then sure­ly some­one will use it, damn it. The com­mand­er tried to cheer every­one up. We are going ahead, leav­ing the stuck equip­ment be­hind, he said, and every­one should be ready for bat­tle. He said it with feigned courage, but in his eyes I saw that he was al­so freak­ing out. It was quite dark and we got word that we are stay­ing here un­til dawn. We climbed into sleep­ing bags with­out tak­ing off our shoes, lay­ing on boxes with mines, em­brac­ing our rifles.

We have communication problems. Feb. 25
Somewhere around 5 in the morn­ing they wake every­one up, tell­ing us to get ready to move out. I lit a cigar­ette and walked around. Our prin­ci­pal medi­cal offi­cer was look­ing for a place to put a wound­ed sol­dier. He con­stant­ly said that he was cold, and we cov­ered him with our sleep­ing bags. I was told later that this guy had died. We drove on ter­ri­ble roads, through some dachas, green­houses, vil­lages. In settle­ments we met oc­casion­al civil­ians who saw us off with a sul­len look. Ukrain­ian flags were flut­ter­ing over some houses, evok­ing mixed feel­ings of re­spect for the brave patriot­ism of these peo­ple and a sense that these colors now some­how be­long to an enemy. We reached a high­way at around 8 a.m. and ... I noticed the trucks of the guys from my squa­dron. They look kind of crazy. I walk from car to car, ask­ing about how things are. Every­one answers me in­com­pre­hen­si­bly: “Damn, this is f–ed up,” “We got wrecked all night,” “I col­lect­ed corpses from the road, one had his brains all out on the pave­ment.” We are ap­proach­ing a fork and signs point to Kher­son and Odes­sa. I am think­ing about how we will storm Kher­son. I don’t think the mayor of the city will come out with bread and salt, raise the Rus­sian flag over the ad­min­is­tra­tion build­ing, and we’ll en­ter the city in a parade col­umn. At around 4 p.m. our con­voy takes a turn and set­tles in the forest. Com­mand­ers tell us the news that Ukrain­ian GRAD rocket launch­ers were seen ahead, so every­one must pre­pare for shell­ing, urgent­ly dig in as deep as pos­si­ble, and al­so that our cars al­most ran out of fuel and we have com­mu­ni­ca­tion prob­lems. I stand and talk with the guys, they tell me that they are from the 11th bri­gade, that there are 50 of them left. The rest are prob­a­bly dead.

Surrounded local airport. Feb. 26-28
Filatyev’s con­voy made its way to Kher­son and sur­round­ed the local air­port, loot­ing stores in vil­lages along the way. On the third day, the con­voy re­ceived the or­der to en­ter Kher­son. Filat­yev was told to stay be­hind and cov­er the front-line units with mor­tar fire if neces­sary. He recount­ed hear­ing dis­tant fight­ing all day. The south­ern port city would be­come the first major Ukrain­ian city that Rus­sia cap­tured in its invasion.

Everyone ran wild. March 1
We marched to the city on foot ... [around 5:30 p.m.] we ar­rived at the Kher­son sea­port. It was al­ready dark, the units march­ing ahead of us had al­ready occu­pied it. Every­one looked ex­haust­ed and ran wild. We searched the build­ings for food, water, showers and a place to sleep, some­one be­gan to take out com­pu­ters and any­thing else of value. Walk­ing through the build­ing, I found an of­fice with a TV. Sev­eral peo­ple sat there and watch­ing the news, they found a bot­tle of cham­pagne in the of­fice. See­ing the cold cham­pagne, I took a few sips from the bot­tle, sat down with them and be­gan to watch the news intent­ly. The chan­nel was in Ukrain­ian, I didn’t under­stand half of it. All I under­stood there was that Rus­sian troops were ad­vanc­ing from all direc­tions, Odes­sa, Khar­kov, Kyiv were occu­pied, they be­gan to show foot­age of brok­en build­ings and in­jured wom­en and chil­dren. We ate every­thing like savages, all that was there was, cereal, oat­meal, jam, honey, cof­fee. ... No­body cared about any­thing, we were al­ready pushed to the limit.

No clue what to do.
March 2-6
Filatyev’s ex­haust­ed con­voy was or­dered to push ahead to storm Myko­laiv and Odes­sa, though the Rus­sian cam­paign had al­ready be­gun to stall. Filat­yev de­scribed how his unit wan­dered in the woods try­ing to reach Myko­laiv, about 40 miles away. He re­called ask­ing a senior offi­cer about their next move­ments. The com­mand­er said he had no clue what to do. The first re­in­force­ments ar­rived: sep­ar­a­tist forces from Donetsk, most­ly men over 45 in shab­by fatigues. Ac­cord­ing to Filat­yev, they were forced to go to the front lines when many reg­u­lar Rus­sian army sol­diers refused.

Some grandmother poisoned our pies.
Into mid-April
From now on and for more than a month it was Ground­hog Day. We were dig­ging in, artil­lery was shell­ing us, our avia­tion was al­most no­where to be seen. We just held posi­tions in the trenches on the front line, we could not shower, eat, or sleep prop­er­ly. Every­one had over­grown beards and were cov­ered in dirt, uni­forms and shoes be­gan to fray. [Ukrain­ian forces] could clear­ly see us from the drones and kept shell­ing us so al­most all of the equip­ment soon went out of or­der. We got a cou­ple of boxes with the so-called human­i­tarian aid, con­tain­ing cheap socks, T-shirts, shorts and soap. Some sol­diers be­gan to shoot them­selves ... to get [the gover­nment mon­ey] and get out of this hell. Our prison­er had his fin­gers and geni­tals cut off. Dead Ukrain­ians at one of the posts were plopped on seats, given names and cigar­ettes. Due to artil­lery shell­ing, some vil­lages near­by prac­ti­cal­ly ceased to exist. Every­one was get­ting angrier and angrier. Some grand­mother poi­soned our pies. Al­most every­one got a fun­gus, some­one’s teeth fell out, the skin was peel­ing off. Many dis­cussed how, when they re­turn, they will hold the com­mand account­able for lack of pro­vi­sion and in­com­pe­tent leader­ship. Some be­gan to sleep on duty be­cause of fatigue. Some­times we man­aged to catch a wave of the Ukrain­ian radio, where they poured dirt on us and called us orcs, which only em­bit­tered us even more. My legs and back hurt ter­ribly, but an order came not to evac­u­ate any­one due to ill­ness. I kept say­ing, “God, I will do every­thing to change this if I sur­vive.” ... I de­cid­ed that I would de­scribe the last year of my life, so that as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble would know what our army is now. By mid-April, earth got in­to my eyes due to artil­lery shell­ing. After five days of tor­ment, with the threat of los­ing an eye loom­ing over me, they evac­u­at­ed me.

Main enemy is propaganda.
Aftermath
I survived, un­like many oth­ers. My con­science tells me that I must try to stop this mad­ness. ... We did not have the moral right to at­tack an­oth­er coun­try, es­pe­cial­ly the peo­ple clos­est to us. This is an army that bul­lies its own sol­diers, those who have al­ready been in the war, those who do not want to re­turn there and die for some­thing they don’t even under­stand. I will tell you a secret. The major­ity in the army, they are dis­satis­fied with what is hap­pen­ing there, they are dis­satis­fied with the govern­ment and their com­mand, they are dis­satis­fied with Putin and his poli­cies, they are dis­satis­fied with the Min­is­ter of De­fense who did not serve in the army. The main enemy of all Rus­sians and Ukrain­ians is prop­a­gan­da, which just fur­ther fuels hatred in peo­ple. I can no long­er watch all this hap­pen and re­main silent.



 FIRST WINTER  Stamps honoring Ukrainian utility workers

QUESTION: Has the winter been very hard? What about the ener­gy and heat­ing sit­u­a­tion? How are peo­ple’s spir­its hold­ing up?
Yes, winter was quite hard. Es­pe­cial­ly the first month, un­til we were able to pro­cure die­sel gen­er­ators to pow­er the most crit­i­cal needs; peo­ple adapt­ed and ad­just­ed to the sit­u­a­tion. The heat­ing and water sup­ply worked al­most un­in­ter­rupt­ed. The same was for the gas sup­ply, which was par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful if you had a gas stove. The fact that the win­ter was quite mild this year helped as well.
The electricity was on and off for about three months, Octo­ber to Jan­uary. You could have from two to twelve hours of elec­tric­ity dur­ing a day, de­pend­ing on the time that has passed since the lat­est Rus­sian mis­sile at­tack, and where you live in the city; quite of­ten, those two hours were at night. There is a night cur­few be­tween 23:00 and 05:00. Peo­ple work at night to catch the elec­tric­ity time; the de­mand for paper and elec­tron­ic books surged. A whole indus­try of DIY-bat­tery mak­ing emerged; un­for­tu­nate­ly, this some­times result­ed in fires.
Almost every fam­ily with an elec­tric stove now has a small tour­ist gas stove, a lamp pow­ered by an accum­u­lator, etc. The wealth­ier bought Eco­flows or sim­ilar big bat­teries. The crit­ical infra­structure (water, heat­ing, gas, hos­pi­tals, police, pet­rol sta­tions) was pre-equipped with die­sel gen­er­ators and gen­eral­ly stayed on­line. As of to­day, we have hap­pi­ly en­joyed about two weeks with a full un­inter­rupt­ed elec­tric­ity sup­ply. But that is most­ly be­cause Rus­sia has not target­ed spe­cif­ic­al­ly the elec­tric­ity grid since the begin­ning of Jan­uary. We even have street­lights on at night!
Generally, there was more stress, more failed plans and sched­ules, and more dis­con­nec­tion (inter­net and tele­phone cellu­lar net­works, pow­ered by elec­tric­i­ty). Peo­ple were stuck in ele­vators, more traf­fic acci­dents hap­pened, dark streets, etc. Most of the shops, res­tau­rants, bars, cine­mas, thea­tres, and hotels work. There is an occa­sion­al air-raid siren, but no­body pays much atten­tion – un­less that is a “seri­ous” at­tack. Fight­ing took place last spring in the sub­urbs, there was very lit­tle phys­ical dam­age to the city of Kyiv; most of the in-city for­ti­fi­ca­tions had been re­moved by autumn.
The eco­nom­ic dam­age to the ener­gy indus­try was enor­mous. All the fridges in super­markets and at home went off, so no froz­en food was avail­able for some time. Trams and trol­ley buses didn’t work for sev­eral days. Ukraine used to be an export­er of elec­tric­ity to Europe, and it be­came an im­port­er now.
There were a lot of fun­ny and heart­warm­ing and inspir­ing mo­ments as well. Teach­ers teach­ing stu­dents from pet­rol sta­tions, neigh­bours shar­ing can­dles with each oth­er. Shop­ping malls and busi­nesses with power­ful gener­ators of­fered free wi­fi and phone charg­ing. The gen­eral mood is quite resil­i­ent – we believe in vic­tory and are just grind­ing to­wards it – both per­sonal­ly and col­lec­tive­ly. For an out­sider, Kyiv may look sur­pris­ing­ly nor­mal these days: Peo­ple go­ing to work, child­ren go­ing to school; traf­fic jams.

QUESTION: Have a lot of inter­nal refu­gees set­tled in­to Kyiv?
Kyiv mayor Vitali Klits­chko (Vitá­lii Volodý­myro­vych Klychkó) said in Decem­ber 2022: Before the inva­sion, there were 3.8 mil­lion peo­ple. In March 2022 – less than one mil­lion. In July 2022 2-to-2.5 mil­lion; now (March 2023) 3.6 mil­lion. 300,000 of them are regis­tered refu­gees from oth­er parts of the country.
Jour­nal­ist Natal­iya Gumen­yuk wrote, in The Guard­ian, in Feb­ru­ary 2023: In non-front­line towns and in Kyiv, life has returned to a kind of nor­mal. We are pre­occu­pied with the thoughts of those who live under con­stant shell­ing or occu­pa­tion. Those who are not in the army think of those who must fight daily; soldiers who sur­vive think of the fallen. As for to­day – be­sides hope in vic­tory, national pride, soli­darity and com­pas­sion, which you see on the sur­face – one of the pre­vail­ing feel­ings among Ukrain­ians is guilt that we are not do­ing enough. Those who left the coun­try feel guilty about those who stayed.


 TIMELINE 
The Last Day of World War One by Lenny Flank

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.
+
November 11 1918, the last day of World War One
+
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.








-¦  June 2023  ¦-


  SPACE RACE 2.1


   ==    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


   +    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.    +    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.    +    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.    +    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.”    +    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.    +    Twen­ty-five years plus of fly­ing has led to wear and tear, caus­ing “tor­sion­al strains, temp­er­ature im­pacts, micro­meteor­oid im­pacts.”    +    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.    +    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.    +   




SANSA

       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

      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

    e     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.”     e     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

      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


      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


      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

       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

      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

      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

      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. Then, on April 28, 2023, NASA announced that Russia will in fact stay on ISS through 2028.       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
      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

      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.       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.”       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 2017prin­ci­ples 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

      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

      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.       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.
      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.”       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.)       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.
      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.




  GROUND  CONTROL 


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.       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.
      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.       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.
      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.       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.       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.”       Math­e­ma­ti­cian Katherine Johnson (b.1918), work­ing in NASA’s flight mechanic division, was told that a space­craft would want to make a landing during prime-time television on a specific date. She then had to figure out when takeoff time must take place. Using analytic geom­etry, Johnson figured it out.       High-school whizkid Mary Winston (b.1921), with degrees in math­e­matics and physical science, worked in the com­puter pool, and was assigned to assist in wind tunnel tests at twice the speed of sound. Showing promise, she went back to school and got an engineer’s degree and became an aerospace engineer. Married to a sailor in the U.S. Navy, she became Mary W. Jackson. The National Aeronautics Space Administration’s D.C. headquarters is now named after her.      
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.       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.”       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.       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.       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.”       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.


  ROCKETEER  


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.       Humankind then followed the lanterns, yet the earliest ones didn’t know to carry oxygen, and returned spouting the wildest tales of beings living in the upper air. The four winds, curious, would approach with whistles and roars and yells, asking questions, including that confounded new con­tri­vance, a wind tunnel.       Sensing fear in their visitors’ eyes, the thunderous voices abated. Zephros drew closer and whis­pered: “We are wind gods of the four cardinal points, heralds of seasons, sons to Typhöeus, fifth and final monster born to mother Earth. We too seek a rea­son for exis­tence, and wheth­er or not it be­comes us to be suit­ed up in turbines, pumps, and such fetters.”       Notos spread icicles while parting his lips: “Can these regulation systems really help with my rest­less­ness? and what’s up with welded insulation?” Euros brought up the sorest point: “Can gravity weigh me down and curb my mood.” Boreas’ grum­ble rumbled: “Magnetosphere con­strains our empire but why? And who are these rocket­men and their reckless aerial turns in guidance and control?”
      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.”       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.       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.      

   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.       Rare and difficult to distill, hydrogen requires a chamber, white-hot iron, run­ning water; and had to wait until a non-porous material to con­tain the new gas, was was dis­cov­ered around 1780, had not yet been de­vel­oped.       A ginormous pillow, with a small opening, tied to a large basket and fed a healthy gulp of heated air, took to rising into the atmosphere. Then, as the trapped air cools, this “hot-air balloon” will descend. The first companions chosen to carry out this maid­en flight were a french sheep, duck and rooster.

a c r o b a t      Smoke from large fires first showed the way during wartime: to send a signal, or initiate a maneuver. Kites were another way to harness wind behavior to send sturdier signals. It can also be used as a measure­ment of distance, or just to “test the wind.” Kites can also fight each other.       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.       Kites were invented for children when they first became aware how they might have, as playpals: the four winds.       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.”
      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.       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.       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.       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.
      Governments were wont to fund space ex­plor­a­tions, get bragging rights, so they practised by dividing up North Pole, a melting continent.       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.



  PIXELS 
Skylight inside the College of Mining, UC Berkeley
  • College of Mining (1907), University of Berkeley.


 CANNON FODDER 

 ATTACK ON HOSTOMEL 
Putin sits in front of wall-size map of Russia.

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.


 TRACED CALLS  Mom, there was a battle.
The Associated Press pub­lished calls made in March 2022 by three Rus­sian sol­diers, Leonid, Maxim and Ivan, in a mili­tary divi­sion near Bucha, a town outside Kyiv that wit­nessed the first atroc­i­ties of the War on Ukraine. (The Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment had been inter­cept­ing Rus­sian calls when their phones ping Ukrain­ian cell towers, pro­vid­ing im­por­tant real-time intel­li­gence for the mili­tary. Now, the calls are al­so poten­tial evi­dence for war crimes.)

Leonid: First, he was shot in his leg. Then his ears were cut off.

Leonid Phone Call #1:
Leonid’s intro­duc­tion to war came on Feb. 24, as his unit crossed into Ukraine from Bela­rus and deci­mat­ed a detach­ment of Ukrain­ians at the bor­der. mother: “When did you get scared?” leonid: “When our com­mand­er warned us we would be shot, 100%. He warned us that al­though we’d be bombed and shot at, our aim was to get through.” mother: “Did they shoot you?” leonid: “Of course. We defeat­ed them.” mother: “Mm. Did you shoot from your tanks?” leonid: “Yeah, we did. We shot from the tanks, machine guns and rifles. We had no losses. We des­troyed their four tanks. There were dead bodies ly­ing around and burn­ing. So, we won.” mother: “Oh what a night­mare! Lyon­ka, you want­ed to live at that mo­ment, right honey?” leonid: “More than ever!” mother: “More than ever, right honey?” leonid: “Of course.” mother: “It’s total­ly hor­ri­ble.” leonid: “They were ly­ing there, just 18- or 19-years old. Am I dif­fer­ent from them? No, I’m not.”

Leonid Phone Call #2:
Leonid tells his moth­er their plan was to seize Kyiv with­in a week, with­out fir­ing a single bul­let. “It was so con­fus­ing,” he says. “They were well pre­pared.” When Leo­nid tells his moth­er cas­ual­ly about loot­ing, at first she can’t be­lieve he’s steal­ing. But it’s be­come nor­mal for him. As he speaks, he watches a town burn on the hori­zon. “Such a beau­ty,” he says. leonid: “Look, Mom, I’m look­ing at tons of houses – I don’t know, doz­ens, hun­dreds – and they’re all emp­ty. Every­one ran away.” mother: “So all the peo­ple left, right? You guys aren’t loot­ing them, are you? You’re not go­ing in­to oth­er people’s houses?” leonid: “Of course we are, Mom. Are you crazy?” mother: “Oh, you are. What do you take from there?” leonid: “We take food, bed lin­en, pil­lows. Blan­kets, forks, spoons, pans.” mother: (Laughing) “You got­ta be kid­ding me.” leonid: “Who­ever doesn’t have any – socks, clean under­wear, T-shirts, sweat­ers.”

Leonid Phone Call #3:
Leo­nid tells his moth­er about the ter­ror of go­ing on patrol and not know­ing what or who they will en­coun­ter. mother: “Oh Lyon­ka, you’ve seen so much stuff there!” leonid: “Well ... civil­ians are lying around right on the street with their brains com­ing out.” mother: “Oh God, you mean the locals?” leonid: “Yep. Well, like, yeah.” mother: “Are they the ones you guys shot or the ones ...” leonid: “The ones killed by our army.” mother: “Lyon­ya, they might just be peace­ful people.” leonid: “Mom, there was a bat­tle. And a guy would just pop up, you know? Maybe he would pull out a gre­nade launch­er ... Or we had a case, a young guy was stopped, they took his cell­phone. He had all this infor­ma­tion about us in his Tele­gram mes­sages – where to bomb, how many we were, how many tanks we have. And that’s it.” mother: “So they knew every­thing?” leonid: “He was shot right there on the spot.” mother: “Mm.” leonid: “He was 17-years old. And that’s it, right there.” mother: “Mm.” leonid: “There was a pris­on­er. It was an 18-year-old guy. First, he was shot in his leg. Then his ears were cut off. After that, he ad­mit­ted every­thing, and they killed him.” mother: “Did he ad­mit it?” leonid: “We don’t im­pris­on them. I mean, we kill them all.” mother: “Mm.”

Leonid Phone Call #4:
Leonid tells his moth­er he was near­ly killed five times. Things are so dis­or­gan­ized, he says, that it’s not un­com­mon for Rus­sians to fire on their own troops – it even hap­pened to him. Some sol­diers shoot them­selves just to get medi­cal leave, he says. mother: “Hel­lo, Lyon­ech­ka.” leonid: “I just want­ed to call you again. I am able to speak.” mother: “Oh, that’s good.” leonid: “There are peo­ple out here who shoot them­selves.” mother: “Mm.” leonid: “They do it for the insur­ance money. You know where they shoot them­selves?” mother: “That’s sil­ly, Lyon­ya.” leonid: “The bot­tom part of the left thigh.” mother: “It’s bull–, Lyon­ya. They’re crazy, you know that, right?” leonid: “Some people are so scared that they are ready to harm them­selves just to leave.” mother: “Yeah, it is fear, what can you say here, it’s human fear. Every­body wants to live. I don’t argue with that, but please don’t do that. We all pray for you. You should cross your­self any chance you get, just turn away from every­one and do it. We all pray for you. We’re all wor­ried.” leonid: “I’m stand­ing here, and you know what the sit­u­a­tion is? I am now 30 meters (100 feet) away from a huge ceme­tery.” (Giggling) mother: “Oh, that’s hor­ri­ble ... may it be over soon.” Leo­nid says he had to learn to emp­ty his mind. “Imagine, it’s night­time. You’re sit­ting in the dark and it’s quiet out there. Alone with your thoughts. And day after day, you sit there alone with those thoughts.” He tells his girl­friend: “I al­ready learned to think of noth­ing while sit­ting out­side.” He prom­ises to bring home a col­lec­tion of bul­lets for the kids. “Tro­phies from Ukraine,” he calls them. His moth­er says she’s wait­ing for him. “Of course I’ll come, why wouldn’t I?” Leo­nid says. “Of course, you’ll come,” his moth­er says. “No doubts. You’re my be­loved. Of course, you’ll come. You are my hap­pi­ness.” Leo­nid re­turned to Rus­sia in May, badly wound­ed, but alive. He told his moth­er Rus­sia would win this war.

Maxim: Because they can also be fucking spotters.

Maxim Phone Call #1:
It’s not clear what mili­tary unit Max­im is in, but he makes calls from the same phone as Ivan, on the same days. The hunt for locals –men, wom­en and chil­dren – who might be in­form­ing on them to the Ukrain­ian mili­tary is con­stant. Max­im is drunk in some of the calls, slur­ring his words, be­cause life at the front line is more than he can take sober. The on­ly rea­son Max­im is able to speak with his fam­ily back in Rus­sia is be­cause they’ve been steal­ing phones from locals. He says they’re even shak­ing down kids. “We take every­thing from them,” he ex­plains to his wife. “Be­cause they can also be f– spot­ters.” On calls home, the high sweet voice of Max­im’s own young child bub­bles in the back­ground as he talks with his wife. maxim: “Do you know how much a gram of gold costs here?” wife: “No.” maxim: “Rough­ly? About two or three thou­sand rubles, right?” wife: “Well, yeah ...” maxim: “Well, I have 1½ kilo­grams (more than three pounds). With labels even.” wife: “Holy f–, are we loot­ers?!” maxim: “With labels, yeah. It’s just that we f– up this ... We were shoot­ing at this shop­ping mall from a tank. Then we go in, and there’s a f– jewel­ry store. Every­thing was taken. But there was a safe there. We cracked it open, and in­side ... f– me! So the seven of us load­ed up.” wife: “I see.” maxim: “They had these f– neck­laces, you know. In our money, they’re like 30-to-40,000 a piece, 60,000 a piece.” wife: “Holy crap.” maxim: “I scored about a kilo and a half of neck­laces, charms, brace­lets ... these ... ear­rings ... ear­rings with rings ...” wife: “That’s enough, don’t tell me.” maxim: “Any­way, I count­ed and if it’s 3,000 rubles a gram, then I have about 3.5 mil­lion. If you off­load it.” wife: “Got it. How’s the sit­u­a­tion there?” maxim: “It’s f– OK.” wife: “OK? Got it.” maxim: “We don’t have a f– thing to do, so we go around and loot the f– shop­ping mall.” wife: “Just be care­ful, in the name of Christ.”

Maxim Phone Call #2:
Maxim and his moth­er dis­cuss the op­pos­ing stor­ies about the war be­ing told on Ukrain­ian and Rus­sian tele­vision. They blame the United States and re­cite con­spi­racy theo­ries pushed by Rus­sian state media. But Max­im and his moth­er be­lieve it’s the Ukrain­ians who are delud­ed by fake news and prop­a­gan­da, not them. The best way to end the war, his moth­er says, is to kill the pres­i­dents of Ukraine and the United States. Later, Max­im tells his moth­er that thou­sands of Rus­sian troops died in the first weeks of war – so many that there’s no time to do any­thing ex­cept haul away the bodies. That’s not what they’re say­ing on Rus­sian TV, his moth­er says. maxim: “Here, it’s all Ameri­can. All the wea­pons.” mother: “It’s the Ameri­cans driv­ing this, of course! Look at their labo­ra­tories. They are devel­op­ing bio­log­i­cal wea­pons. Coro­na­virus lit­eral­ly start­ed there.” maxim: “Yeah, I al­so saw some­where that they used bats.” mother: “All of it. Bats, migrat­ing birds, and even coro­na­virus might be their bio­log­i­cal wea­pon. They even found all these papers with sig­na­tures from the U.S. all over Ukraine. Biden’s son is the master­mind be­hind all of this. ... When will it end? When they stop sup­ply­ing wea­pons.” maxim: “Mm.” mother: “Un­til they catch (Ukrain­ian Pres­i­dent Volo­dy­myr) Zelen­skyy and exe­cute him, noth­ing will end. He’s a fool, a fool! He’s a pup­pet for the U.S. and they real­ly don’t need him, the fool. You watch TV and you feel bad for the peo­ple, the civil­ians, some trav­el­ling with young kids. ... If I was giv­en a gun, I’d go and shoot Biden.” (Laughs) maxim: (Laughs)

Maxim Phone Call #3:
One night last March, Max­im was hav­ing trou­ble keep­ing it to­geth­er on a call with his wife. He’d been drink­ing, as he did every night. He told her he’d killed civil­ians – so many he thinks he’s go­ing crazy. He said might not make it home alive. He was just sit­ting there, drunk in the dark, wait­ing for the Ukrain­ian artil­lery strikes to start. wife: “Why? Why are you drink­ing?” maxim: “Every­one is like that here. It’s im­pos­si­ble with­out it here.” wife: “How the f– will you pro­tect your­self if you are tipsy?” maxim: “Total­ly nor­mal. On the con­trary, it’s eas­ier to shoot ... civil­ians. Let’s not talk about this. I’ll come back and tell you how it is here and why we drink!” wife: “Please, just be care­ful!” maxim: “Every­thing will be fine. Hon­est­ly, I’m scared s–less my­self. I nev­er saw such hell as here. I am f– shocked.” wife: “Why the f– did you go there?” Minutes later, he’s on the phone with his child. ‘You’re com­ing back?” the child asks. “Of course,” Maxim says.

Maxim Phone Call #4:
In their last inter­cept­ed call, Maxim’s wife seems to have a prem­o­ni­tion. wife: “Is every­thing all right?” maxim: “Yeah. Why?” wife: “Be hon­est with me, is every­thing all right?” maxim: “Huh? Why do you ask?” wife: “It’s noth­ing, I just can’t sleep at night.” Max­im is a lit­tle breath­less. He and his unit are get­ting ready to go. His wife asks him where they’re go­ing. “For­ward, I won’t be able to call for a while.”

Ivan: It is scary, Olya. It really is scary.

Ivan Phone Call #1:
Ivan was in Bela­rus on train­ing when they got a Tele­gram mes­sage: “Tomor­row you are leav­ing for Ukraine. There is a geno­cide of the Rus­sian pop­u­la­tion. And we have to stop it.” When his moth­er found out he was in Ukraine, she said she stopped speak­ing for days and took seda­tives. Her hair went gray. Still, she was proud of him. Ivan end­ed up in Bucha. ivan: “Mom, hi.” mother: “Hi, son! How–” ivan: “How are you?” mother: “Van­ya, I under­stand they might be lis­ten­ing so I’m afraid–” ivan: “Doesn’t mat­ter.” mother: “... to ask where you are, what’s hap­pen­ing. Where are you?” ivan: “In Bucha.” mother: “In Bucha?” ivan: “In Bucha.” mother: “Son, be as care­ful as you can, OK? Don’t go charg­ing around! Al­ways keep a cool head.” ivan: “Oh, come on, I’m not charg­ing around.” mother: “Yeah, right! And yes­ter­day you told me how you’re gon­na f– kill every­one out there.” (Laughs) ivan: “We will kill if we have to.” mother: “Huh?” ivan: “If we have to – we have to.” mother: “I under­stand you. I’m so proud of you, my son! I don’t even know how to put it. I love you so much. And I bless you for every­thing, every­thing! I wish you suc­cess in every­thing. And I’ll wait for you no mat­ter what.”

Ivan Phone Call #2:
Ivan calls his girl­friend, Olya, and tells her he had a dream about her. ivan: “F–, you know, it’s driv­ing me crazy here. It’s just that ... You were just ... I felt you, touched you with my hand. I don’t under­stand how it’s pos­si­ble, why, where ... But I real­ly felt you. I don’t know, I felt some­thing warm, someth­ing dear. It’s like someth­ing was on fire in my hands, so warm ... And that’s it. I don’t know. I was sleep­ing and then I woke up with all these thoughts. War ... You know, when you’re sleep­ing – and then you’re like ... War ... Where, where is it? It was just dark in the house, so dark. And I went out­side, walked around the streets, and thought: damn, f– it. And that’s it. I real­ly want to come see you.” girl­friend: “I am wait­ing for you.” ivan: “Wait­ing? OK. I’m wait­ing, too. Wait­ing for the time I can come see you ... Let’s make a deal. When we see each oth­er, let’s spend the en­tire day to­geth­er. Lay­ing around, sit­ting to­geth­er, eat­ing, look­ing at each oth­er – just us, to­geth­er.” girl­friend: (Laughs) “Agreed.” ivan: “To­geth­er all the time. Hug­ging, cud­dling, kiss­ing ... To­geth­er all the time, not let­ting each oth­er go.” girl­friend: “Well, yeah!” ivan: “You can go f– crazy here. It’s so f– up, the s– that’s hap­pen­ing. I really thought it would be easy here, to tell you the truth. That it’s just gon­na be easy to talk, think about it. But it turned out to be hard, you need to think with your head all the time. So that’s that. We are real­ly at the front line. As far out as you could be. Kyiv is 15 kilo­meters (about 10 miles) from us. It is scary, Olya. It real­ly is scary.” girl­friend: “Hello?” ivan: “Do you hear me?” The line drops.

Ivan Phone Call #3:
As things get worse for Ivan in Ukraine, his moth­er’s patriot­ism deep­ens and her rage grows. mother: “Do you have any pre­dic­tions about the end ...?” ivan: “We are here for the time be­ing. We’ll prob­ably stay until they clean up the whole of Ukraine. May­be they’ll pull us out. May­be not. We’re go­ing for Kyiv.” mother: “What are they go­ing to do?” ivan: “We’re not going any­where until they clean up all of these pests.” mother: “Are those bas­tards get­ting cleaned up?” ivan: “Yes, they are. But they’ve been wait­ing for us and pre­par­ing, you under­stand? Pre­par­ing prop­er­ly. Ameri­can moth­erf– have been help­ing them out.” mother: “F– f–. F– kill them all. You have my bless­ing.” ... Death came for Ivan. In July, a local paper pub­lished a notice of his funer­al with a pho­to of him, again in fatigues hold­ing a large rifle. Ivan died heroic­al­ly in Rus­sia’s “spe­cial mili­tary oper­ation,” the announce­ment said. “We will nev­er for­get you. All of Rus­sia shares this grief.” Reached by the AP in Jan­uary, Ivan’s moth­er at first denied she’d ever talked with her son from the front. But she agreed to lis­ten to some of the inter­cept­ed audio and con­firmed it was her speak­ing with Ivan. “He wasn’t in­volved in mur­ders, let alone in loot­ing,” she told the AP be­fore hang­ing up the phone. Ivan was her on­ly son.


 'THIS MADNESS'  A Russian Soldier's Journal
Forced march to unknown location. Feb. 15 2022
I arrived to the train­ing ground [in Stary Krym, Cri­mea]. Our en­tire squa­dron, about 40 peo­ple, all lived in one tent with plank boards and one make­shift stove. Even in Chech­nya, where we only lived in tents or mud huts, our liv­ing con­di­tions were or­ganized bet­ter. Here we had no­where to wash up and the food was hor­ri­ble. For those who ar­rived later than the rest, me and about five other peo­ple, there was nei­ther a sleep­ing bag, nor camo, armor, or hel­mets left. I final­ly re­ceived my rifle. It turned out that it had a brok­en belt, was rusty and kept get­ting stuck, so I cleaned it in oil for a long time try­ing to put it in order. Around Feb­ruary 20, an order came for every­one to urgent­ly gather and move out, pack­ing light­ly. We were sup­posed to per­form a forced march to some un­known loca­tion. Some peo­ple joked that now we would at­tack Ukraine and cap­ture Kyiv in three days. But al­ready then I thought it is no time for laugh­ter. I said that if some­thing like this were to hap­pen, we would not cap­ture any­thing in three days.

Our salary per day $69. Feb. 23
The division com­mander ar­rived and, con­gra­tu­lat­ing us on the [Defend­er of the Fatherland] holi­day, an­nounced that start­ing from to­mor­row, our salary per day would be $69. It was a clear sign that some­thing serious is about to hap­pen. Rumors be­gan spreading that we are about to go storm Kher­son, which seemed to be non­sense to me. Every­thing changed that day. I no­ticed how peo­ple be­gan to change, some were ner­vous and tried not to com­mu­ni­cate with any­one, some frank­ly seemed scared, some, on the con­trary, were un­usual­ly cheerful.

It's started. Feb. 24
At about 4 a.m. I opened my eyes again and heard a roar, a rum­ble, a vibra­tion of the earth. I sensed an acrid smell of gun­powder in the air. I look out of the truck and see that the sky is lit bright from vol­leys. It was not clear what is hap­pen­ing, who was shoot­ing from where and at whom, but the weari­ness from lack of food, water and sleep dis­ap­peared. A min­ute later, I lit up a cigar­ette to wake up, and real­ized that the fire is com­ing 10-20 kilo­meters ahead of our con­voy. Every­one around me al­so be­gan to wake up and smoke and there was a quiet mur­mur: “It’s start­ed.” We must have a plan. The con­voy be­came ani­mated and start­ed to slow­ly move for­ward. I saw the lights switch on in the houses and peo­ple look­ing out the win­dows and bal­conies of five-story build­ings. It was al­ready dawn, per­haps 6 a.m., the sun went up and I saw a doz­en heli­copters, a doz­en planes, armored as­sault vehi­cles drive across the field. Then tanks ap­peared, hun­dreds of pieces of equip­ment under Rus­sian flags. By 1 p.m. we drove to a huge field where our trucks got bogged down in the mud. I got ner­vous. A huge col­umn stand­ing in the mid­dle of an open field for half an hour is just an ideal tar­get. If the enemy notices us and is near­by, we are f–ed. Many be­gan to climb out of the trucks and smoke, turn­ing to one from an­oth­er. The or­der is to go to Kher­son and capture the bridge across the Dnie­per. I under­stood that some­thing global was hap­pen­ing, but I did not know what exact­ly. Many thoughts were spin­ning in my head. I thought that we couldn’t just at­tack Ukraine, may­be NATO real­ly got in the way and we inter­vened. May­be there are al­so bat­tles go­ing on in Rus­sia, may­be the Ukrain­ians at­tacked to­gether with NATO. May­be there is some­thing go­ing on in the Far East – if Ameri­ca also start­ed a war against us. Then the scale will be huge, and nuclear wea­pons, then sure­ly some­one will use it, damn it. The com­mand­er tried to cheer every­one up. We are going ahead, leav­ing the stuck equip­ment be­hind, he said, and every­one should be ready for bat­tle. He said it with feigned courage, but in his eyes I saw that he was al­so freak­ing out. It was quite dark and we got word that we are stay­ing here un­til dawn. We climbed into sleep­ing bags with­out tak­ing off our shoes, lay­ing on boxes with mines, em­brac­ing our rifles.

We have communication problems. Feb. 25
Somewhere around 5 in the morn­ing they wake every­one up, tell­ing us to get ready to move out. I lit a cigar­ette and walked around. Our prin­ci­pal medi­cal offi­cer was look­ing for a place to put a wound­ed sol­dier. He con­stant­ly said that he was cold, and we cov­ered him with our sleep­ing bags. I was told later that this guy had died. We drove on ter­ri­ble roads, through some dachas, green­houses, vil­lages. In settle­ments we met oc­casion­al civil­ians who saw us off with a sul­len look. Ukrain­ian flags were flut­ter­ing over some houses, evok­ing mixed feel­ings of re­spect for the brave patriot­ism of these peo­ple and a sense that these colors now some­how be­long to an enemy. We reached a high­way at around 8 a.m. and ... I noticed the trucks of the guys from my squa­dron. They look kind of crazy. I walk from car to car, ask­ing about how things are. Every­one answers me in­com­pre­hen­si­bly: “Damn, this is f–ed up,” “We got wrecked all night,” “I col­lect­ed corpses from the road, one had his brains all out on the pave­ment.” We are ap­proach­ing a fork and signs point to Kher­son and Odes­sa. I am think­ing about how we will storm Kher­son. I don’t think the mayor of the city will come out with bread and salt, raise the Rus­sian flag over the ad­min­is­tra­tion build­ing, and we’ll en­ter the city in a parade col­umn. At around 4 p.m. our con­voy takes a turn and set­tles in the forest. Com­mand­ers tell us the news that Ukrain­ian GRAD rocket launch­ers were seen ahead, so every­one must pre­pare for shell­ing, urgent­ly dig in as deep as pos­si­ble, and al­so that our cars al­most ran out of fuel and we have com­mu­ni­ca­tion prob­lems. I stand and talk with the guys, they tell me that they are from the 11th bri­gade, that there are 50 of them left. The rest are prob­a­bly dead.

Surrounded local airport. Feb. 26-28
Filatyev’s con­voy made its way to Kher­son and sur­round­ed the local air­port, loot­ing stores in vil­lages along the way. On the third day, the con­voy re­ceived the or­der to en­ter Kher­son. Filat­yev was told to stay be­hind and cov­er the front-line units with mor­tar fire if neces­sary. He recount­ed hear­ing dis­tant fight­ing all day. The south­ern port city would be­come the first major Ukrain­ian city that Rus­sia cap­tured in its invasion.

Everyone ran wild. March 1
We marched to the city on foot ... [around 5:30 p.m.] we ar­rived at the Kher­son sea­port. It was al­ready dark, the units march­ing ahead of us had al­ready occu­pied it. Every­one looked ex­haust­ed and ran wild. We searched the build­ings for food, water, showers and a place to sleep, some­one be­gan to take out com­pu­ters and any­thing else of value. Walk­ing through the build­ing, I found an of­fice with a TV. Sev­eral peo­ple sat there and watch­ing the news, they found a bot­tle of cham­pagne in the of­fice. See­ing the cold cham­pagne, I took a few sips from the bot­tle, sat down with them and be­gan to watch the news intent­ly. The chan­nel was in Ukrain­ian, I didn’t under­stand half of it. All I under­stood there was that Rus­sian troops were ad­vanc­ing from all direc­tions, Odes­sa, Khar­kov, Kyiv were occu­pied, they be­gan to show foot­age of brok­en build­ings and in­jured wom­en and chil­dren. We ate every­thing like savages, all that was there was, cereal, oat­meal, jam, honey, cof­fee. ... No­body cared about any­thing, we were al­ready pushed to the limit.

No clue what to do.
March 2-6
Filatyev’s ex­haust­ed con­voy was or­dered to push ahead to storm Myko­laiv and Odes­sa, though the Rus­sian cam­paign had al­ready be­gun to stall. Filat­yev de­scribed how his unit wan­dered in the woods try­ing to reach Myko­laiv, about 40 miles away. He re­called ask­ing a senior offi­cer about their next move­ments. The com­mand­er said he had no clue what to do. The first re­in­force­ments ar­rived: sep­ar­a­tist forces from Donetsk, most­ly men over 45 in shab­by fatigues. Ac­cord­ing to Filat­yev, they were forced to go to the front lines when many reg­u­lar Rus­sian army sol­diers refused.

Some grandmother poisoned our pies.
Into mid-April
From now on and for more than a month it was Ground­hog Day. We were dig­ging in, artil­lery was shell­ing us, our avia­tion was al­most no­where to be seen. We just held posi­tions in the trenches on the front line, we could not shower, eat, or sleep prop­er­ly. Every­one had over­grown beards and were cov­ered in dirt, uni­forms and shoes be­gan to fray. [Ukrain­ian forces] could clear­ly see us from the drones and kept shell­ing us so al­most all of the equip­ment soon went out of or­der. We got a cou­ple of boxes with the so-called human­i­tarian aid, con­tain­ing cheap socks, T-shirts, shorts and soap. Some sol­diers be­gan to shoot them­selves ... to get [the gover­nment mon­ey] and get out of this hell. Our prison­er had his fin­gers and geni­tals cut off. Dead Ukrain­ians at one of the posts were plopped on seats, given names and cigar­ettes. Due to artil­lery shell­ing, some vil­lages near­by prac­ti­cal­ly ceased to exist. Every­one was get­ting angrier and angrier. Some grand­mother poi­soned our pies. Al­most every­one got a fun­gus, some­one’s teeth fell out, the skin was peel­ing off. Many dis­cussed how, when they re­turn, they will hold the com­mand account­able for lack of pro­vi­sion and in­com­pe­tent leader­ship. Some be­gan to sleep on duty be­cause of fatigue. Some­times we man­aged to catch a wave of the Ukrain­ian radio, where they poured dirt on us and called us orcs, which only em­bit­tered us even more. My legs and back hurt ter­ribly, but an order came not to evac­u­ate any­one due to ill­ness. I kept say­ing, “God, I will do every­thing to change this if I sur­vive.” ... I de­cid­ed that I would de­scribe the last year of my life, so that as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble would know what our army is now. By mid-April, earth got in­to my eyes due to artil­lery shell­ing. After five days of tor­ment, with the threat of los­ing an eye loom­ing over me, they evac­u­at­ed me.

Main enemy is propaganda.
Aftermath
I survived, un­like many oth­ers. My con­science tells me that I must try to stop this mad­ness. ... We did not have the moral right to at­tack an­oth­er coun­try, es­pe­cial­ly the peo­ple clos­est to us. This is an army that bul­lies its own sol­diers, those who have al­ready been in the war, those who do not want to re­turn there and die for some­thing they don’t even under­stand. I will tell you a secret. The major­ity in the army, they are dis­satis­fied with what is hap­pen­ing there, they are dis­satis­fied with the govern­ment and their com­mand, they are dis­satis­fied with Putin and his poli­cies, they are dis­satis­fied with the Min­is­ter of De­fense who did not serve in the army. The main enemy of all Rus­sians and Ukrain­ians is prop­a­gan­da, which just fur­ther fuels hatred in peo­ple. I can no long­er watch all this hap­pen and re­main silent.



 FIRST WINTER  Stamps honoring Ukrainian utility workers

QUESTION: Has the winter been very hard? What about the ener­gy and heat­ing sit­u­a­tion? How are peo­ple’s spir­its hold­ing up?
Yes, winter was quite hard. Es­pe­cial­ly the first month, un­til we were able to pro­cure die­sel gen­er­ators to pow­er the most crit­i­cal needs; peo­ple adapt­ed and ad­just­ed to the sit­u­a­tion. The heat­ing and water sup­ply worked al­most un­in­ter­rupt­ed. The same was for the gas sup­ply, which was par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful if you had a gas stove. The fact that the win­ter was quite mild this year helped as well.
The electricity was on and off for about three months, Octo­ber to Jan­uary. You could have from two to twelve hours of elec­tric­ity dur­ing a day, de­pend­ing on the time that has passed since the lat­est Rus­sian mis­sile at­tack, and where you live in the city; quite of­ten, those two hours were at night. There is a night cur­few be­tween 23:00 and 05:00. Peo­ple work at night to catch the elec­tric­ity time; the de­mand for paper and elec­tron­ic books surged. A whole indus­try of DIY-bat­tery mak­ing emerged; un­for­tu­nate­ly, this some­times result­ed in fires.
Almost every fam­ily with an elec­tric stove now has a small tour­ist gas stove, a lamp pow­ered by an accum­u­lator, etc. The wealth­ier bought Eco­flows or sim­ilar big bat­teries. The crit­ical infra­structure (water, heat­ing, gas, hos­pi­tals, police, pet­rol sta­tions) was pre-equipped with die­sel gen­er­ators and gen­eral­ly stayed on­line. As of to­day, we have hap­pi­ly en­joyed about two weeks with a full un­inter­rupt­ed elec­tric­ity sup­ply. But that is most­ly be­cause Rus­sia has not target­ed spe­cif­ic­al­ly the elec­tric­ity grid since the begin­ning of Jan­uary. We even have street­lights on at night!
Generally, there was more stress, more failed plans and sched­ules, and more dis­con­nec­tion (inter­net and tele­phone cellu­lar net­works, pow­ered by elec­tric­i­ty). Peo­ple were stuck in ele­vators, more traf­fic acci­dents hap­pened, dark streets, etc. Most of the shops, res­tau­rants, bars, cine­mas, thea­tres, and hotels work. There is an occa­sion­al air-raid siren, but no­body pays much atten­tion – un­less that is a “seri­ous” at­tack. Fight­ing took place last spring in the sub­urbs, there was very lit­tle phys­ical dam­age to the city of Kyiv; most of the in-city for­ti­fi­ca­tions had been re­moved by autumn.
The eco­nom­ic dam­age to the ener­gy indus­try was enor­mous. All the fridges in super­markets and at home went off, so no froz­en food was avail­able for some time. Trams and trol­ley buses didn’t work for sev­eral days. Ukraine used to be an export­er of elec­tric­ity to Europe, and it be­came an im­port­er now.
There were a lot of fun­ny and heart­warm­ing and inspir­ing mo­ments as well. Teach­ers teach­ing stu­dents from pet­rol sta­tions, neigh­bours shar­ing can­dles with each oth­er. Shop­ping malls and busi­nesses with power­ful gener­ators of­fered free wi­fi and phone charg­ing. The gen­eral mood is quite resil­i­ent – we believe in vic­tory and are just grind­ing to­wards it – both per­sonal­ly and col­lec­tive­ly. For an out­sider, Kyiv may look sur­pris­ing­ly nor­mal these days: Peo­ple go­ing to work, child­ren go­ing to school; traf­fic jams.

QUESTION: Have a lot of inter­nal refu­gees set­tled in­to Kyiv?
Kyiv mayor Vitali Klits­chko (Vitá­lii Volodý­myro­vych Klychkó) said in Decem­ber 2022: Before the inva­sion, there were 3.8 mil­lion peo­ple. In March 2022 – less than one mil­lion. In July 2022 2-to-2.5 mil­lion; now (March 2023) 3.6 mil­lion. 300,000 of them are regis­tered refu­gees from oth­er parts of the country.
Jour­nal­ist Natal­iya Gumen­yuk wrote, in The Guard­ian, in Feb­ru­ary 2023: In non-front­line towns and in Kyiv, life has returned to a kind of nor­mal. We are pre­occu­pied with the thoughts of those who live under con­stant shell­ing or occu­pa­tion. Those who are not in the army think of those who must fight daily; soldiers who sur­vive think of the fallen. As for to­day – be­sides hope in vic­tory, national pride, soli­darity and com­pas­sion, which you see on the sur­face – one of the pre­vail­ing feel­ings among Ukrain­ians is guilt that we are not do­ing enough. Those who left the coun­try feel guilty about those who stayed.


 TIMELINE 
The Last Day of World War One by Lenny Flank

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.




-|  June 2023  |-

  THREAD & THRUM  title of article: Rubble Rubble
Photo of meteorite that landed in Sanchore, northern India, in 2020.
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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Photo of meteorite that landed in Sanchore, northern India, in 2020. Composed of germantium, iron, nickel and platinum.  Photo: Alan Fitzsimmons
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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Enhanced photo of comet Neowise.
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.
Two photos: girls posing next to large boulder in Hawaii. Giant rock found ln Joshua Tree, California.





















❚-❚-❚•  In the after­math of the Trojan War, Olym­pians car­ried on the fight with each oth­er – god versus god. This theo=machia so angered Ge (pronunced Gaea), that the premier earth god­dess revolt­ed. Egypt dis­ap­peared in­to a “screaming wind”. An­oth­er Aesir-Vanir con­flict had been brew­ing when rip­ples from the war in the south trig­gered the eight­eenth Rag­narok, send­ing nine worlds and twelve hells top­pling into a watery worm­hole.

❚-❚-❚•  Ge began cramp­ing and vomit­ed out con­tents in her vaults. The larg­est eject­iles had been im­pris­oned there by her grand­son Jupiter. These (4th class) mon­sters, gain­ing back their agen­cy, prompt­ly at­tacked Olym­pus by stack­ing moun­tains and climb­ing up, trig­ger­ing giganto=machia 2.0. What else that didn’t climb out was shak­­en off in un­dulat­ing spasms, clear­ing out cav­­erns and empty­­ing all of the hells that Ge knew about. The last to de­part Tar­­ta­rus, with the keys, were under­world deities Pluto and his titan-aunt Hekate, mak­ing sure every gate was open and all left un­­guarded.

❚-❚-❚•  The goddess with no parents then picked Atlas up and threw the sec­ond-gen titan at her male coun­ter­part, which is what gave Uranus his famous red-eye. Their son, first-gen titan Hyper­ion, wit­nessed all this and had a hydro­gen-heart at­tack; in 1948, the solar god would step down from the Sun. Tak­ing his place on the grav­ity=throne was that “con­tain­er of multi­tudes”, com­plex god Apol­lon, whose outer manifestation now is Helius, “the eld­est flame”. Rendering of the invariable plane in relation to the inner solar system.

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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Rendering of the Kuiper Belt as a large band surrounding the inner solar system.
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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Rendering of the angled Scattered Disc in relation to trans-Neptune space.
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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Rendering of the Öpik-Oort Cloud in relation to the inner and outer solar system.
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).


❚-❚-❚•  Marooned on a chunk float­ing south as Pan­gea broke apart, indi­genes clung on and end­ed up on an­oth­er shore, un­der an­oth­er view of the Sun. Look­ing at sum­mer skies through wintry eyes, they saw the physi­cal, spirit­ual and mor­tal planes clear­er and earli­er than most. They were the first to notice, when the first atom­ic bomb test too place on July 17 1945 in New Mex­i­co, how Ge had curled up and suc­cumbed to cata­tonia. Now­adays, the first peo­ples of Austra­lia are best friends with the faded goddess of the Earth, and help to re­pair her bandag­ing to suit every season.

❚-❚-❚•  Nereus actual­ly didn’t fell any­thing while Ge went through her geo=­machia. His ab­orig­i­nal root mat­ter being H-two-oh, “Medi­ter­ran­ean” soon enough be­gan to splash some of it over the ex­posed parts of Earth, ini­ti­at­ing a tidal rite to soothe his beloved, his grand­mother, his only home.

❚-❚-❚•  In 1950, Pluto and Hekate pre­sent­ed them­selves at the gravity☷throne, and told every­one pres­ent what they had seen: a trans-Nep­tune region of space where there were more rings, where space rocks and ob­jects have zany or­bits, and where every­thing was sus­pend­ed in­side a stupen­dous gos­sa­mer cloud. The king and crone of the under­world had come to the house of the Sun to an­nounce the pass­ing of the old order.

❚-❚-❚•  This had al­ready be­gun dur­ing the for­ma­tion of the in­ner solar sys­tem, when Jupi­ter had jostled with neigh­bor Saturn over throne place­ments. This mini=machia, be­tween father and son, was won by the son. Yet by widen­ing and ad­just­ing their or­bits to avoid col­li­sion, it also caused near­by Uranus to flip onto his back, all the while mak­ing Nep­tune, near enough, to sway and heave, back and forth.

❚-❚-❚•  The premier sea god had im­medi­ate­ly coun­tered to save his trident☵throne, but in the ensu­ing tem­pest dam­age hap­pened, and fling­ing what flaked off into re­mote regions. Nep­tune had also smacked into some­thing sub­stan­tial, shat­ter­ing the ob­ject and hurl­ing debris large and small far, far, far away. Cas­ual­ties from this oly=machia are now every­where you look, yet are sub­ject one and all to the grav­ity☷throne. Thus end­ed Hekate’s ac­count of the gath­er­ing to­geth­er of a hypo­the­ti­cal heaven.

❚-❚-❚•  Pluto, the first minor plan­et, was rec­og­nized as the first trans-Nep­tune enti­ty, a fit­ting place­ment for the king of the dead over­see­ing a mov­ing ceme­tery in out­er space. The near­est cas­ual­ties made up a vast legion called the Kui­per Belt, the sec­ond ring around the Sun. There is yet a third ring, faint­ly sketched out, the odd-behav­ing ob­jects that make up the Scat­tered Disc. Fur­ther out yet is a bub­ble of ceme­tery dust, the Öpik-Oort Cloud, com­posed of multi-bil­lion bits of iced peb­bles. All these trans-Nep­tune ob­jects to­geth­er make up the “frozen forgots”, some larg­er some small­er, some spher­i­cal with moons, mari­nat­ing for the most part in blue-grey bruises un­der dessi­cat­ed dress­ings.

❚-❚-❚•  Pluto had, begin­ning 2004, come to under­stand this new neigh­bor­hood. In a gold­en chariot drawn by four black horses, the infer­nal god had crossed over the sec­ond ring of the Sun and got stuck momen­ta­ri­ly in bow shock, the first visit­or from the in­ner solar sys­tem to do so. Breach­ing which hurled Pluto inex­on­or­ably through un­known terri­tory be­fore end­ing up in poten­tial­ly hazard­ous inter­stellar space (1904). The king of shad­ows had to find a rip­pling band, caused by the Sun’s rota­tion, that resem­bles a “balle­rina’s skirt” in motion. Sens­ing his mo­ment, Pluto drew his sword and act­ed, cleav­ing the hydro­gen wall and step­ping over, ar­riv­ing at the final bar­rier of the helio­sphere, a gelat­in­ous mem­brane that causes ter­mi­na­tion shock – a shield fil­ter­ing out harm­ful rays from cross­ing over.
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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.
+ Rendering of Kuiper Belt minor planet Haumea and two satellites.
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 duckegg-shaped orbit of Scattered Disc object Eris in relation to the inner solar system.
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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Extreme-oval orbit of Öpik-Oort Cloud object Leleākūhonua in relation to the inner solar system. Img: Roberto Molar Dandanosa Scott Sheppard Carnegie Insitution for Science
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.


❚-❚-❚•  Regular minis­tra­tions by human­kind on Ge was work­ing, and she be­gan to detox, then itched and bloat­ed and ac­ci­den­tal­ly shot great-grand­son Mars in­to out­er space. Ang­ered by this rejec­tion, the mili­tary god turned around and demol­ished the near­est planet; the year was 1534. Long before this event took place, daughter to the sea Venus had long departed the wretched Earth to seek safety closer to the Sun. Mars even­tual­ly bur­ied all the re­mains in his back yard, a ceme­tery now called the Aster­oid Belt (1801), and is the first ring around the Sun.

❚-❚-❚•  Six years later, corpses be­gan to float into view. The first ha­ppened to be spher­i­cal, and hap­pened to be small­er than the Moon, when it was later meas­ured. So er­ron­eous­ly it was tit­led first a plan­et, then an aster­oid, be­fore be­com­ing, in 2006, the first minor plan­et in the solar sys­tem. The larg­est ob­ject in the Aster­oid Belt is agri­cul­tural god­dess Ceres (1801).

❚-❚-❚•  Now revived, the sister to Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto – the second female in Pantheon 1.0 – crosses over to the Gar­den of Apol­lon 2.0, pre­pares beds for grow­ing bar­ley, com­poses hymns to sun­light. Made of am­bient mat­ter, hav­ing no def­i­nite bound­ary, the Sun is a star with the capac­i­ty to shed root mat­ter as ener­gy, in a form rapid enough as to seem solid; the Sun can as­sume diverse forms. Each sun al­so under­goes on­go­ing com­bus­tion, has grav­i­ta­tion­al sway over some sur­round­ing space, its helio­sphere: a shape­less bub­ble, be­cause solar wind plus inter­stel­lar wind plus motion in space.

❚-❚-❚•  A sizeable space rock with an elec­tro-mag­net­ic field is a plan­et, and can host one or more sat­el­lites. There are also plan­ets en­gulfed in visi­ble gasses; some have rings. The celes­tial court now lists the eight clos­est plan­ets to the house of the Sun as the sole first-gen pan­theon. And the oldest seat is the chthon☶­throne on Earth.