Pour one out for the absurd pro-Trump churches that spent all Sunday morning talking about how “Trump was God’s chosen prophet”, only to leave the church and realize they were right, but for the wrong God
Christina Koch was a firefighter at the South Pole at -111°F before she ever applied to be an astronaut. That was maybe the fourth most interesting line on her resume. She grew up in North Carolina, got three degrees from NC State, and her first real job was building deep-space instruments at NASA.
Then she left for Antarctica. Spent three and a half years bouncing between the Arctic and Antarctic as a research scientist, including a full winter at the South Pole base. That means going months without sunlight or fresh food, with a crew of about 50 people and no way out until flights resume. While she was down there, she also joined the glacier search-and-rescue team.
After coming back, she went to Johns Hopkins and built instruments for two NASA missions (one of them is still orbiting Jupiter right now). She figured out how to start a tiny vacuum pump that NASA designed for a future Mars rover. Johns Hopkins nominated it for their Invention of the Year in 2009. Then she went back to the field. More time in Antarctica and a stretch up in Greenland. A government research station in northern Alaska, near the top of the world. Then she ran another one in American Samoa, near the equator.
In 2013, NASA selected her from 6,300 applicants. Eight people got in. Her first space mission was supposed to be a normal rotation on the International Space Station, but NASA extended it. She ended up staying 328 straight days and orbiting Earth 5,248 times, covering about 139 million miles (roughly 291 round trips to the Moon). Up there, she ran over 210 experiments, including tests of cancer drugs in zero gravity and 3D printers that can build structures close to human tissue. Six spacewalks, 42 hours floating outside the station. She learned Russian for the training. She flies supersonic jets.
Right now, Koch is on Artemis II, heading for a flyby behind the far side of the Moon. The crew launched on April 1 and is on track to travel about 252,000 miles from Earth, which would break the all-time human distance record of 248,655 miles set by Apollo 13 in 1970. That record has stood for 56 years, and it was set during a disaster that nearly killed the crew. Fred Haise, one of the Apollo 13 astronauts, is 92 now. He told Koch: "I heard you're going to break our record."
Nobody had left Earth's neighborhood since December 1972. Koch and her three crewmates are the first in 53 years, and they are coming home at about 25,000 mph. That is faster than any crewed spacecraft has ever come back through the atmosphere.
It’s telling that every person who has been to space says the moment they see the Earth, they feel a sense of global community, togetherness, and understand that we are one people in an infinite universe…
Except for billionaires who look at Earth and think “I must own it all”
I'm a little late to the game, but the makeup and hairstyling team that decided to change Jonathan Bailey’s hairstyle and sideburns between season one and season two of Bridgerton deserves the Nobel Prize
“Jeffrey, the prophet Mohammed has brought us together so that I can teach you the ways of the Quran… also Inshallah, you will provide the Russian prostitute”
Emirati CEO starts teaching Epstein about the Qur'an and then ends the email with a request for a Russian woman.
This is truly a sick world, we're so cooked.
MAGA hero Kyle Rittenhouse would disagree Kash and unlike Kyle, who drove across state lines with a loaded firearm for “reasons”… Pretti actually lived there
Kash Patel: "You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It's that simple. You don't have a right to break the law." (Pretti was carrying a gun legally.)
If Michael Caine’s final film scene isn’t him playing Dom’s Grandfather who heroically sacrifices himself in a wheelchair that’s loaded with jet fuel and NOX, then what are we even doing here?