sending a rocket around the moon to collide on enemy territory on the way back is what i call a pro gamer move

Imagine gravity is fractal… because light is just a wave, and gravity is just a wave… So imagine there’s a big piece of glass that splits up gravity like a prism, so that there’s, like, blue gravity and yellow gravity. And then somebody gets hit by the red gravity, and it makes them super heavy, so they have super strength, but, like, they’re also really slow. And another guy gets hit by microwave gravity. So he’s trying to zap everybody, and just when he’s about to zap the main guy, we see a lady come out, and she turns out to be Ultraviolet Girl, and she has Super-Speed, so she beats him. And it, like, also gave her giant cans.

—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

—Bradley Lovell, The Looker

I get the meme and the juxtaposition is… depressing, but it’s sad how people don’t realize that this is an international mission - Jeremy Hansen is a Canadian, 1/2 of the capsule was built by the ESA, the DSN sites are in the US, Spain and Australia… This really isn’t a singularly American affair, and it’s rather bleak that we can erase all that cooperation because of this stupid fucking war.

@slothrop I believe Tom Lehrer has a song about the responsibilities for rockets going up and coming down.

For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads: “We came in peace for all Mankind.” As the United States was dropping 7 ½ megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.

• Carl Sagan