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Until you have suffered much in your heart, you cannot learn humility.
Stalin’s deportation of 200,000 Crimean Tatars to Uzbekistan after the Great Patriotic War was old history, but the bigotry in the military still ran deep—ever deeper, he found, the closer he got to Moscow. Being an ethnic minority from the edge of the Soviet Union made him second class in a classless society.
Flying high-performance machines is a dangerous profession, and occasionally it kills people.”
When the third-stage motor shut off, the spacecraft was suddenly weightless, orbiting around the Earth. The little metal orb drifted gently up from its resting place, becoming a tiny conductive balloon in a playground of circuitry.
A stifled sneeze, 19 months earlier in Phoenix, Arizona, had caused the failure of the primary voice circuitry for Pursuit, Apollo 18’s Command Module. The crew was just talking to themselves.
His mother’s face was round, her cheekbones high. Her wide-set eyes looked squarely at the camera. He could sense the joy of the day in the way she held her neck, so straight and proud. The veil wasn’t hers, and she knew it, but the day was, and so was a future together with this man. Her broad, full-lipped mouth bore the gentlest of knowing smiles. A smile Chad could still see and feel in his memory.
All flying machines were essentially the same; you just had to figure out how to get them started and how they wanted to kill you.
She glanced at JW, who was carefully keeping his face impassive. “I should play poker with you two. I’d clean you out.” She smiled and shook her head as Janie arrived, balancing the three plates.
“Why does it take so long to refresh your TV screen?” “Because it’s not really TV,” he explained. “It’s just still images, and it takes a while to send all the little ones and zeroes across the four hundred thousand kilometers from the Moon to their big dish, outside.”
All it had taken was a lifetime of hard work and the strategic loosening of one nut.
He lifted his head to take a long look at Phillips, and then he nodded. “If you take no risks, you win no victories. Do it.”
A trade-off, like everything in spaceflight. Purpose versus risk.
Pain was just a reminder of victory.
The sheltered harbors of the Hawaiian island of Oahu are a natural wonder. The inlets and bays reach deep inland, giving the islanders access to fresh water flowing down the steep slopes of the Ko‘olau Range and protection from the ocean’s storms. Food is abundant on the lush surrounding land, and under the bays’ clear, still waters are pearl-producing oysters. Since before written history, Pacific sailors had found sanctuary in what the ancient Hawaiians called Wai Momi, the Waters of Pearl.
Mare Serenitatis.
