Love Is Love

Living right on the parade route was pretty convenient.  Happy Pride! (2019)

I can read your palm like a tattoo

I hear the ghosts still bickering in you.

Float On

blessing the boats:

may the tide

that is entering even now

the lip of our understanding

carry you out

beyond the face of fear

may you kiss

the wind then turn from it

certain that it will

love your back     may you

open your eyes to water

water waving forever

and may you in your innocence

sail through this to that

Lucille Clifton.

I Closed the Day as It Had Begun with Thanksgiving to God

Fake quote, boys. JQA never said it. It was said ABOUT him by an author named John Wingate Thornton in 1860. Call David Barton and get your money back. https://t.co/CVwxLx1fe2

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) June 27, 2026

Reminds me of some shit Hawley tried to pull a few years back with a real (for a change) JQA quote.  I don't understand why they have such a hardon for using him to connect the Declaration, which was written when he was a lad of 9, to Christianity.  It's weird.

John Quincy was indeed a rather spiritual man, but also a sober jurist and constitutionalist.  In fact, he didn't swear his oath of office on a Bible¹:

I repaired to the Hall of the House of Representatives, and after delivering from the Speakers Chair my inaugural Address to a crowded auditory, and I pronounced from a Volume of the Laws, held up to me by John Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States, the Oath faithfully to execute the Office of President of the United States, and to the best of my ability, to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States...

Another weird thing is that these same people distorting his views on church and state never seem to celebrate, or even acknowledge, his tireless efforts fighting the Gag Rule that prevented speaking of abolition in the House.  Wonder why?

Selah.

1 - I haven't done a deep dive into his intent, but it has been suggested he did so "to underscore his belief in the separation of church and state."

Hoping for the Best but Expecting the Worst

Might as well make the shuttle today's theme:

STS-71 was a crewed spaceflight that was the third mission of the US/Russian Shuttle-Mir Program. The mission began on June 27, 1995, with the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis from launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Atlantis became the first Space Shuttle to dock with the Russian space station Mir, delivering a relief crew of two cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyev and Nikolai Budarin to the station and recovering Increment astronaut Norman Thagard. Atlantis returned to Earth on July 7 with a crew of eight. It was the first of seven straight missions to Mir flown by Atlantis, and the second Shuttle mission to land with an eight-person crew after STS-61-A in 1985.

During the five days the Shuttle was docked to Mir, the combined spacecraft became the largest in orbit at the time. STS-71 marked several key achievements: it was the first Shuttle docking with a space station, the first crew exchange between a Shuttle and a station, and the 100th crewed space launch by the United States. The mission carried Spacelab and provided logistical resupply for Mir. The joint US/Russian crews conducted various life science investigations using Spacelab and performed the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment-II (SAREX-II).

I want to note that even today, no spacecraft (I ain't counting ISS) can match this crew capacity:

Now about that historic docking:

Docking occurred at 9 am EDT, June 29, using R-Bar or Earth radius vector approach, with Atlantis closing in on Mir from directly below. R-bar approach allows natural forces to brake the orbiter's approach more than would occur along standard approach directly in front of the space station; also, an R-bar approach minimizes the number of orbiter jet firings needed for approach. 

The manual phase of the docking began with Atlantis about a half-mile (800 m) below Mir, with Gibson at the controls on aft flight deck. Stationkeeping was performed when the orbiter was about 75 meters (246 ft) from Mir, pending approval from Russian and U.S. flight directors to proceed. Gibson then maneuvered the orbiter to a point about 10 meters (33 ft) from Mir before beginning the final approach to station. 

Closing rate was close to the targeted 0.1 foot per second (30 mm/s), being approximately 0.107 foot per second (33 mm/s) at contact. Interface contact was nearly flawless: less than 25 millimeters (0.98 in) lateral misalignment and an angular misalignment of less than 0.5 degrees per axis. No braking jet firings had been required.

Turns out, John Young had some involvement:

I discussed several ways that we could upgrade flight crew knowledge so that STS-71 would approach Mir in the best possible way and arrive there for docking at only 0.1 feet per second. STS-71 Atlantis was the third mission in the U.S.-Russian shuttle/Mir program, but it was to be the first docking. After a lot of practice in the shuttle engineering simulator, I reported that the orbiter could readily dock at 0.1 fps. That velocity would provide the 230,000-pound orbiter with six times less energy than the normal 16,000-pound Soyuz or Progress.
...

Orbital mechanics was something I knew a little bit about, so in 1996 I reminded the space station folks that because rendezvous was taking two or three days, from one-fifth up to one-third of the time in orbit was being used just to rendezvous. To the year 2000, that would mean that the seventeen shuttle missions for assembly, test, and checkout of the space station would spend 34 to 51 days just with the orbiter chasing the space station. That seemed crazy! I recommended we look at ways to start doing on-time launches and to rendezvous in four or fewer orbits. We had done that in Gemini and Apollo; we eventually even did it in one orbit. It should have been easy for the shuttle to do with GPS, but it never did manage to do it that way.

These days, the default for Crew Dragon is still 1-2 days for rendezvous/docking at ISS (gives astronauts time to adjust to microgravity, test systems, and conserve fuel), although there is a fast track option of several hours that both Dragon and Soyuz can perform.  The latter has even pulled off a 2-orbit ultrafast approach in about 3 hours.  Regardless of technique, it is a lovely, tricky ballet.

<exits, humming Blue Danube>

Heaven Can Wait, We’re Only Watching the Skies

On this date 44 years ago, the fourth shuttle mission, and final test flight, lifted off.  To mark the event, let's turn to John Young's memoir, Forever Young¹:

For STS-4 on 27 June–4 July 1982, I paired up Mattingly and Hank Hartsfield, for the first time making a shuttle crew that had graduated from the same school, Auburn University. Like STS-3, this mission was designed to put all of the shuttle systems through their paces. 

Naturally there were a few glitches. During launch, both solids were lost forever after separation when they fell back and hit the ocean at high velocity. In orbit, the thermal gradient closure of the payload bay doors failed. The port door of the payload bay jammed the aft latches after partial travel, which had to be thermally corrected. 

Like STS-3, it was a complex test mission. The crew had more than seven hundred hours in the shuttle mission simulator and more than nine hundred STA approaches. T. K. flew the orbiter manually to landing from Mach 0.9 through rollout. This became the recommended pilot control procedure that was used right up to the end of the shuttle program. As T. K. noted at the time, the orbiter was difficult to land because its center of rotation lay forward of the cockpit instead of close to the center of gravity as in most aircraft. 

Its landing was the first time a shuttle had come down on a concrete runway (runway 22 at Edwards). Columbia alighted 948 feet down the runway at 204 knots and at a sink rate of 1.1 feet per second—very nicely done. President and Mrs. Reagan met the crew as they left the vehicle. T. K. and Hank were surprised to see the First Couple, even though that was actually why we had them land on the concrete runway. Nancy Reagan would not have been able to walk well in high heels in the sand! 

Officially the shuttle was now “operational”—meaning, among other things, that we were now ready to put in a crew of four and fly without ejection seats. I was okay with just that label from an engineering perspective, but some leading government bureaucrats and NASA officials were not. For the shuttle to be “fully operational,” they declared that it needed to be ready to launch 24 missions a year, thereby becoming the only U.S. launcher available for commercial payloads. 

Early on, some yokels in NASA had predicted that we’d be able to fly as many as 116 missions between 1981 and 1985; in reality, we flew 23 and had to stretch everybody’s abilities and capacities to the breaking point just to fly those. We couldn’t have done anywhere near 116 missions even if the business had been there to do them all—and it wasn’t, not even close...

I was amazed that we could disconnect the ejection seats and call the shuttle “operational” after only four missions. Truth was, as NASA would finally recognize officially following the loss of Columbia in 2003, the shuttle should never have been considered anything but an experimental vehicle. Neither civilian nor military aircraft have ever been considered operational until proven over thousands of test flights in their final operational configurations, whereas the shuttle, even at the end of its life in 2011, still had fewer than two hundred flights total, with almost continuous modification between 1981 and 2011.

Speaking of Hank Hartsfield, who is perhaps less well-known than his commander or their boss (Young became Chief of the Astronaut Office in '74), here's a snip from Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle:

Although under pressure to launch quickly, NASA, by the end of 1985, was still struggling to make twelve flights a year, with no indication that the tempo of operations would increase any time soon. “The whole system was starting to crater,” Hank Hartsfield later recounted, with scheduled flights hurriedly prepared so that NASA could meet its self-imposed guidelines. Unable to achieve the economies of scale sought, the shuttle, by the end of 1985, looked less and less like a commercial satellite launcher than another in a long line of experimental space vehicles.

In July 1985, NASA selected the New Hampshire social studies teacher Christa McAuliffe as a prime crew member for a future shuttle flight, with the Idaho second-grade teacher Barbara Morgan serving as her backup. Unlike with previous astronaut assignments, NASA assigned McAuliffe to a single mission for which the flight crew had already been selected; the crew, led by Commander Dick Scobee (a former lifting body test pilot who joined NASA in 1978), greeted her upon her return to JSC.

Without piloting or scientific duties on the forthcoming flight, McAuliffe would deliver two televised lessons for children from space. According to news accounts, Scobee welcomed McAuliffe with the comment that “no matter what happens on the mission, it’s going to be known as the teacher mission,” a statement intended to flatter her, but which instead reflected Scobee’s recognition that the public cared little for the difficult work of the flight, which would include a satellite deployment and astronomical experiments...Career astronauts, McAuliffe believed, resented both her presence and NASA’s suggestion that she would “ ‘humanize’ ” spaceflight, a remark that (perhaps inadvertently) branded her fellow crew members as inhuman.
...

The space shuttle, despite statements otherwise, had not been designed for passengers and could be destroyed relatively easily through the careless operation of its many controls. Astronauts were aware of these vulnerabilities, but “joyriding” “part-timers” (as NASA career astronauts called them) were not. “Individuals who were clueless about the risks of spaceflight were being exploited for public relations purposes,” later wrote Mullane. “The entire part-timer program was built on the lie that the shuttle was nothing more than an airliner.”

The shuttle was a flawed, experimental machine that taught us some deadly lessons, of which there could have been many more, as illustrated by Young's sixth and final spaceflight:

Entry of STS-9 turned out to be exciting—too exciting...

When our attitude’s dead band was reached, the primary nose jets on the orbiter fired. When they fired, GPC 1 failed. We then keyed GPC 2 into Orbit Operations Mode 2. About six minutes later, we got another round of dead-band firings from our primary nose jets. Then GPC 2 crashed. When the first computer failed, my knees started shaking. When the second computer failed, I turned to jelly. It looked like Brewster felt the same way...

The postflight mission report explained what happened next with the looped onboard computers: “A ground review of GPC-2 memory dump indicated some memory alterations had occurred. However, GPC-2 was reinitialized in OPS 3 and was used in the redundant set with GPC-3 and GPC-4 for entry and landing. At Orbiter nose wheel touchdown (342:11:16:45), GPC-2 again failed.”

In a nutshell, Columbia experienced two failed computers, one of which we restored only to have it fail again at landing. The cause of one of the failures turned out to be a sliver of solder eleven-thousandths of an inch thick that became dislodged when the thrusters were fired, shorting out the CPU board. During the postflight debriefing, I remarked about this incident, “Had we activated the backup flight software when the problem first emerged, loss of vehicle and crew would have resulted.”
... 

As suggested earlier, postflight investigation found that the computer failures had been caused by particles in the GPC amplifiers. The general-purpose computers had not been given the normal zero-gravity “particle impact noise detection” tests. So, again, we were lucky that the computers did not totally fail. If GPC 2 had failed during entry and we had used the recommended procedures to fix it, we would have lost flight control of the orbiter. That would have been very bad for us. 

Shortly after landing, our number one APU—providing hydraulic power to move the elevons, rudder, speed brakes, and body flap—shut down prematurely because of a turbine “under-speed” condition. Later we found out that, shortly after the first shutdown, APU 2 also shut down because of a turbine not turning fast enough. We landed on a Thursday, and on Saturday we found out that APU 1 exploded eleven minutes after touchdown and that APU 2 exploded twenty-five minutes after touchdown. 

We were told the APUs had actually caught fire—caused by leaking hydrazine fuel—at 40,000 feet when we had gotten down to the altitude where oxygen in the air allowed it. Not to mince words, we were on fire when we landed, though of course we didn’t know it at the time. We didn’t find out until two days later.

Space is hard.

Selah.

1 - The book is...okay.  Ostensibly co-authored with James Hansen (wrote First Man, which I haven't read yet, but I did like the movie), it was mostly written by Young, whose stuff doesn't flow as well as other astronauts' from where I sit.  It is also horribly edited.  But it does provide good coverage over the man's awesome, long NASA tenure.

Would you stay if she promised you heaven?

I mean, probably.

Finally Cooled Down

summer heat
even mystery
wears less

Akari

— Basho Society (@BashoSociety) June 26, 2026

A Matter Which Lies Solely Between Man & His God

Trump dozes off as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick says there's no such thing as separation of church and state in the U.S. Constitution https://t.co/22uBKTUcFy

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) June 26, 2026

Indeed, as RMJ notes, "Patrick’s argument the phrase is not in the Constitution is correct."  I might also add that there is no such thing as "Christian-based nation."  However, in Article VI of the US Constitution: no religious Test shall ever be required.

The dude who drafted the Declaration of Independence wrote some stuff down, too:

The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason & right. it still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally past; and a singular proposition proved that it’s protection of opinion was meant to be universal. where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the words ‘Jesus Christ’ so that it should read ‘a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion’ the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.

So did the dude who introduced the independence resolution:

The declaration of Rights, it seems to me, rather contends against forcing modes of faith and forms of worship, than against compelling contribution for the support of religion in general. I fully agree with the presbyterians, that true freedom embraces the Mahomitan and the Gentoo as well as the Xn religion and upon this liberal ground I hope our Assembly will conduct themselves.

And since Hamilton was wrong that it was a bad idea to make a list of our rights, Madison got this written down: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

Finally, there is no mention of G-d in the Constitution, but guess where you will find one?

Selah.

I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping

Story of my life.

What dark irony

Owed to Pedagogy:

So we lay, still as stars on the living

room floor, poring over algorithms:

divisors & dividends, quotient

the first synonym for resolution

I ever learned, & would later

come to love for its sound alone,

how it reminded me, even then,

of words like quantum & quotation

mark, both ways of saying nothing

means what you think it means

all the time. The observable

universe hides behind its smooth

obsidian dress, & all we can

do is grasp at it in myths

& figures, see what sticks,

give all our best language

to the void...

Joshua Bennett.

#throwbackthursday

Back when I didn't have 2 highschoolers.  (2022)

Sokkin inn í djúpa tøgn

Sunken into the deep silence.

Take Account of All You’ve Seen

Address to the Heart at the Lake's Edge:

Listen, Heart, O Time’s red furious clock,
Securely lodged within your cage of bone!
The waves beat frantic wings against the rock,
But do not fear, my Heart, we are alone.
You have betrayed me your three times and more
To send me kneeling sick upon the ground,
Crying my love out to the moon-bright shore,
Only to rise at length to face a pond
Whereon no star rests, no white plume is thrown
Across the stricken earth’s contorted ice.
Stay with me, Heart, until the flesh is blown
Into the dust’s sweet loss. Betray me trice,
Twenty times three, but when a bird wheels south,
Send me running wild with songs upon my mouth!

Willard Maas.