1971

Two men walked on the surface of the moon.
Others will, later. What are words to do?
And what of the dreams and fashionings of art
before this real, almost unreal, event?
Heady with daring and with holy dread,
those sons of Whitman now have left their print
on the moon's wasteland, the unviolated
prehuman sphere, changing and permanent.
The love of Endymion in his mountain vigil,
the hippogriff, the curious sphere of Wells,
which in my memory is real and true,
now all take substance. Triumph belongs to all.
Today there is not a single man on earth
who does not feel more confident, more sure.
The unforgettable day thrills with new force
from the single rightness of the odyssey
of those benign magicians. The moon,
which earthly love still seeks out in the sky
with sorrowing face and still-unslaked desire,
will be its monument, everlasting, one.

Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Alastair Reid.

*

Originally posted 11/17/2011.

the highest step

I let my vision run from the barren blackness of the heavens down through the indigo to the gently curving horizon far below. I tried to relax. I glanced up once more and the disc of the sun was sharp and brilliant against the ebony backdrop of deep space.

Even shaded by my helmet’s tinted faceplate, my eyes burnt. Nothing was familiar up there. Nothing seemed real. What I was about to do struck some as gutsy, but to others it was flat-out crazy.

Col. Joseph Kittinger describing his record-breaking skydive from 102,800 feet on August 16, 1960.

Seriously amazing footage from his jump + his description of it here.

In the news: a jump from the edge of space.

Photograph by Volkmar Wentzel.

predictions

Timetable predicting future space travel from Mechanics Illustrated 'Space Satellites' special edition, 1958.

Via dreams of space.

in other news

Cosmic dust, a new planet, and a career change opportunity.

the known universe

It's good to know where we stand.

hammer vs. feather

High school physics, revisited. Galileo knew what was what.

Via Kottke.

dropping through space

To fall into the void as I fell: none of you know what that means. For you, to fall means to plunge perhaps from the twenty-sixth floor of a skyscraper, or from an airplane which breaks down in flight: to fall headlong, grope in the air a moment, and then the Earth is immediately there, and you get a big bump. But I'm talking about the time when there wasn't any Earth underneath or anything else solid, not even a celestial body in the distance capable of attracting you into its orbit. You simply fell, indefinitely, for an indefinite length of time. I went down into the void, to the most absolute bottom conceivable, and once there I saw that the extreme limit must have been much, much farther below, very remote, and I went on falling, to reach it. Since there were no reference points, I had no idea whether my fall was fast or slow. Now that I think about it, there weren't even any proofs that I was really falling: perhaps I had always remained immobile in the same place, or I was moving in an upward direction; since there was no above or below these were only nominal questions and so I might just as well go on thinking I was falling, as I was naturally led to think.

Italo Calvino, 'The Form of Space'

Images: Ralph Crane's photos of a trampolinist in a space suit imitating the falling movements of a cat, to find out how astronauts can move in space, 1968. From the LIFE Archive.

start your day like an astronaut

40 years ago today

July 20, 1969: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon.

Photo of Buzz Aldrin from NASA. You can see restored footage of the moon walk here.

lift off

Today's the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch, the first manned mission to the moon.

Photo from NASA.

traveling home

Fortunately, my trip won't be as long as this one.

Astrophotographer Thierry Legault's photo of the Space Shuttle Atlantis crossing in front of the sun, taken on May 12, 2009.