I was at Flo's in June for some whole belly clams, $24.95 market price for a small order. I was in the mood so I paid up.
While they were really good I wouldn't pay that much again, I guess they noticed they couldn't justify raising the price any more.

A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns- Mario Puzo

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CommodoreOriginal Crew9,876 postsSince 2018

jpdMOD

noreaster.com2021#1529

[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/bob-odenkirk-hospitalized-collapsing-better-030859892.html[/URL]

[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/bob-odenkirk-better-call-saul-heart-attack-1234989892/[/URL]

A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns- Mario Puzo

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CommodoreOriginal Crew9,876 postsSince 2018

Roccus7MOD

noreaster.com2021#1530

Many places up here, the Capitol of Soft Shell Clamming, have changed there menu prices for fried clams to the dreaded "MKT Price", just like lobstah...

Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing? - H. D. Thoreau
Veni. Vidi. Cepi. - with apologies to Gaius Julius Caesar

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AdmiralOriginal Crew21,717 postsSince 2018

Roccus7MOD

noreaster.com2021#1531

Sad, but a definite sign of the times...

[HEADING=2]Acadia, other national parks exploring options after being ‘loved to death’[/HEADING]
[pressherald.com/2021/07/28/acadia-other-national-parks-exploring-options-after-being-loved-to-death/]('https://www.pressherald.com/2021/07/28/acadia-other-national-parks-exploring-options-after-being-loved-to-death/')

By Kevin Miller July 28, 2021

Atop Cadillac Mountain, it wasn’t unusual to have 500 cars competing for the 150 spots available to visitors hoping to catch the sweeping views from Acadia National Park’s highest point.

Out west, Arches National Park in Utah regularly has to close its gates to additional visitors after reaching capacity. And at Zion National Park – another iconic Utah location that was the third-busiest national park last year – visitors faced a two-hour wait to catch a shuttle bus and a four-hour wait to even start hiking one popular trail over Memorial Day weekend.

“We can accidentally love our parks to death,” Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said Wednesday while opening a Senate subcommittee hearing on overcrowding at some national parks. While it is great to see so many Americans visiting these protected places, King said, crowds are straining resources and “souring what should be a once-in-a-lifetime vacation.”

“Watching the sunrise from the top of Cadillac Mountain is a wonderful experience,” said King, the subcommittee chairman. “Staring at the taillights of the car in front of you as you are trying to get up the mountain and find a parking place? Not so much.”

Visitation to the country’s most popular national parks, including Acadia, has been rising steadily for several years. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the situation in many locations as cooped-up Americans – prohibited from traveling overseas and yearning for some outside time away from home – have flooded into parks for vacation.

Wednesday’s meeting of the National Parks Subcommittee of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee was aimed at discussing different steps that are being taken across the country to address the situation.

Rocky Mountain National Park, for instance, now requires a “timed-entry reservation” or a reservation with a service provider in order to visit any part of the 415-square mile park.

At Acadia, park managers went with a more scaled-back approach starting this year by requiring timed-entry reservations to drive up Cadillac Mountain between sunrise and sunset. While the park has shelved plans for a timed-entry system at Sand Beach and the busy stretch of Park Loop Road, officials are still considering it to address severe congestion at Jordan Pond and Bass Harbor Head Light.

[]('')
Park visitors crowd the summit of Cadillac Mountain, one of the most popular spots in Acadia National Park, this month. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

PRAISE FOR TIMED ENTRY
Acadia Superintendent Kevin Schneider told subcommittee members via Zoom from Bar Harbor that he was “very pleased” with the first month and a half of the reservation system for Cadillac. In addition to the largely positive reviews on sites such as Tripadvisor, Schneider recalled talking to a man who had been on the summit twice in a week for sunrise – once before reservations were needed and then after.

“And he said this is so much better with the reservation system,” Schneider said. “Visitors understand that there are only 150 parking spaces on Cadillac Mountain and we want everybody to have a really high-quality experience. Not everybody can be up there at the same time with their cars.”

Between May 26, the first day, and July 13, Acadia sold 77 percent of the 83,900 vehicle reservations that were made available through the National Park Service’s online portal at recreation.gov for $6 each. All 7,100 of the sunrise reservations sold and 75 percent of 76,800 daytime reservations available to vehicles sold during that period, according to figures supplied to the Portland Press Herald on Wednesday.

“The rollout has been very successful on Cadillac Mountain and has improved the visitor experience by leaps and bounds,” Stephanie Clement, conservation director at the nonprofit Friends of Acadia, said in an interview.

Clement said the organization’s group of roving public educators/researchers, called “summit stewards,” who interact with the public, report that the situation is much improved atop Cadillac this year in terms of efficiency and safety. The congestion led to tense and, at times, unsafe conditions – particularly in the pre-dawn darkness – as cars jockeyed for a spot or parked in unauthorized areas along the roadways.
“I think that visitors are a whole lot happier not having to drive around in circles looking for parking spaces and getting frustrated, parking illegally on the grass,” Clement said.

[]('')
Acadia National Park allows parking in the right lane in some the more popular spots along the Loop Road, like this spot near Sand Beach, shown this month. The park has plans, however, to reduce parking at some locations. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

Acadia has logged nearly 1.2 million visitors this year through June – a 33 percent increase over the pre-pandemic figures for 2019. For all of 2019, Acadia had roughly 3.4 million visits, which was just shy of the record-setting 3.5 million visits the year before.

PARKS VISITATION INCREASING
Many of the park service’s most popular locations are seeing similar trends. Between 2013 and 2019, visitation was up 20 percent across the national parks system, and many parks – including Glacier and Yellowstone – have seen visitation double since 1980.

“These visitors are evidence of the success of the federal government protecting locations that are both valued by the public and deserving of national park designation,” Kristen Brengel, senior vice president for government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, said during the hearing. “However, the growth in visitation is also posing one of the greatest challenges NPS has ever faced.”

Although there are more than 400 “units” within the National Park Service system, just 23 parks and monuments account for roughly half of the more than 300 million visits logged annually (with the exception of 2020) in recent years. And about a dozen of those 23 face “significant congestion conditions,” said Michael Reynolds, director of the National Park Service region that includes most of the western parks.

Reynolds said the park service is exploring a host of options tailored to each location, in consultation and collaboration with local communities and partners. Timed-entry reservation systems have been implemented in Acadia, Yosemite, Glacier and Rocky Mountain national parks – some still on a pilot basis – while many other places are expanding shuttle services or partnering with outside groups on other transportation options.

The agency also has a mobile phone app and launched a “Plan Like a Park Ranger” campaign to encourage visitors to plan in advance, make reservations whenever possible and have backup plans in place (perhaps at another nearby park) if their first choice activity isn’t feasible.

Of course, changes don’t always go as smoothly as planned.

CHANGES IRK SOME PARK VISITORS
Kevin Gartland, executive director of the Whitefish (Montana) Chamber of Commerce, said the reservation system at Glacier National Park was rolled out too late and with insufficient marketing. While he credited the National Park Service for working with businesses and keeping them abreast of the coming changes, Gartland said many people make their arrangements to visit Glacier a year or two in advance.

As a result, Gartland said many business owners are spending their summer scrambling to help irate guests get into the park.

“They’ve traveled thousands of miles, they’ve made tens of thousands of dollars (in arrangements) on hotels, airfare and rental car reservations only to see their vacation ‘ruined’ because they couldn’t get that $2 ticket to see Glacier National Park,” Gartland said.

Yet, Gartland said the timed-entry reservation is reducing crowds at popular spots within the park. So while the timing and marketing of the system could have been better, Gartland said local businesses also wouldn’t want to go back to 2018 and 2019 when overcrowding forced the park to close the gates to additional visitors.

King and ranking member Sen. Steve Daines, R-Montana, encouraged Reynolds to work with technology partners to allow visitors to use mobile apps to track congestion in parks and learn about lesser-known alternative sites to visit in the area.

“You know, this is a good thing,” Daines said. “While there are challenges that we need to look at because of increased visitation, we also need to ensure we are not closing off our parks to the world and that we continue to build visitation, the jobs and the economic benefits that they provide.”

King said understaffing within the park service also is an issue and that he hopes his colleagues will consider the intense interest that Americans are exhibiting in visiting parks when considering proposals for new areas to preserve. In an interview afterward, King said he hoped the hearing will lead to more conversation about options for addressing overcrowding.

“There are lots of experiments going on around the country, including at Acadia … and it is important for us to know how those are working,” King said.

Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing? - H. D. Thoreau
Veni. Vidi. Cepi. - with apologies to Gaius Julius Caesar

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AdmiralOriginal Crew21,717 postsSince 2018

Roccus7MOD

noreaster.com2021#1532

Sponge Bob's ancestors are almost 1 Billion Years Old!!!

[HEADING=2]Oldest fossils of animals may be in Canada, study says[/HEADING]
[pressherald.com/2021/07/28/oldest-fossils-of-animals-may-be-in-canada-study-says/]('https://www.pressherald.com/2021/07/28/oldest-fossils-of-animals-may-be-in-canada-study-says/')

By CHRISTINA LARSON July 28, 2021
[[IMG alt="Earliest Animal Fossil"]https://multifiles.pressherald.com/uploads/sites/10/2021/07/Earliest_Animal_Fossil_64296.jpg[/IMG]]('')
A field location in the Northwest Territories, Canada, where geologist Elizabeth Turner may have found the earliest fossil record of animal life on Earth in the area shown, according to a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Courtesy of Elizabeth Turner/Laurentian University via AP

WASHINGTON — A Canadian geologist may have found the earliest fossil record of animal life on Earth, according to a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Around a billion years ago, a region of northwest Canada now defined by steep mountains was a prehistoric marine environment where the remains of ancient sponges may be preserved in mineral sediment, the paper says.

Geologist Elizabeth Turner discovered the rocks in a remote region of the Northwest Territories accessible only by helicopter, where she has been excavating since the 1980s. Thin sections of rock contain three-dimensional structures that resemble modern sponge skeletons.

“I believe these are ancient sponges – only this type of organism has this type of network of organic filaments,” said Joachim Reitner, a geobiologist and expert in sponges at Germany’s University of Göttingen, who was not involved in the research.

The dating of adjacent rock layers indicates the samples are about 890 million years old, which would make them about 350 million years older than the oldest undisputed sponge fossils previously found.

“What’s most stunning is the timing,” said Paco Cardenas, an expert on sponges at Sweden’s Uppsala University, who was not involved in the research. “To have discovered sponge fossils from close to 900 million years ago will greatly improve our understanding of early animal evolution.”

Many scientists believe the first animal groups included soft sponges or sponge-like creatures that lack muscles and nerves but have other features of simple animals, including cells with differentiated functions and sperm.

To be sure, there’s very little scientific consensus or certainty about anything dating back a billion years ago, so other researchers will likely continue to vet and debate Turner’s findings.

“I think she’s got a pretty strong case. I think this is very worthy of publishing – it puts the evidence out there for other people to consider,” said David Bottjer, a paleobiologist at University of Southern California, who was not involved in the research.

Scientists believe life on Earth emerged around 3.7 billion years ago. The earliest animals appeared much later, but exactly when is still debated.

Until now, the oldest undisputed fossil sponges date to around 540 million years ago, an era called the Cambrian period.

But scientists using a line of reasoning called the molecular clock – where they analyze the rate of genetic mutations to backdate when two species likely diverged – say that available evidence points to sponges emerging much earlier, around a billion years ago.

Yet no supporting physical evidence has yet been found until now.

“This would be the first time that a sponge fossil has been found from before the Cambrian, and not only before, but way before – that’s what’s most exciting,” said Uppsala University’s Cardenas, adding that the research seems to confirm the molecular clock estimates.

Fossil evidence is scant before the Cambrian period, when animals first developed hard skeletons, exoskeletons and shells, which are more likely to be preserved.

“Those kinds of fossils belong to more complicated animals – obviously there has to be a back history” of simpler animals like sponges emerging first, said the paper’s author, Turner, who is based at Laurentian University in Ontario.

The dating of 890 million years ago is significant because, if the sponge’s identification is confirmed, it shows that the first animals evolved before a time when oxygen in the atmosphere and ocean reached a level scientists once thought was necessary for animal life. Yet recent research shows that some sponges can survive with very little oxygen.

“Everything on Earth has an ancestor. It’s always been predicted that the first evidence of animal life would be small and cryptic, a very subtle clue,” said Roger Summons, an MIT geobiologist who was not involved in the research.

Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing? - H. D. Thoreau
Veni. Vidi. Cepi. - with apologies to Gaius Julius Caesar

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AdmiralOriginal Crew21,717 postsSince 2018

Old MudFREE2021#1533

Well i rushed up there for gold but i'm not going back for fossils !! Although i have a few from there. :giggle:

Tell your Children every day that you love them
I was so poor growing up, if i were not a boy i would have had Nothing to play with !! :)
All that matters in the end is that we Loved
"Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass; it's about learning to dance in the rain."

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CommodoreOriginal Crew5,182 postsSince 2018

waderFREE2021#1534

[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/news/dubai-coping-125-degree-heat-042104930.html[/URL]

"Well, it's alright.
.............even if you're old and gray."
"Well, it's alright.
............you still got something to say."

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AdmiralOriginal Crew20,900 postsSince 2018

waderFREE2021#1535

[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/news/ship-forced-leave-us-waters-174642738.html[/URL]

"Well, it's alright.
.............even if you're old and gray."
"Well, it's alright.
............you still got something to say."

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AdmiralOriginal Crew20,900 postsSince 2018

Roccus7MOD

noreaster.com2021#1536

This one should shape up to a Battle Royal, 2 species of endangered sucker fish vs. people...

[HEADING=2]Homes in West lose water as wells run dry in drought-ravaged basin[/HEADING]
[pressherald.com/2021/07/29/homes-in-west-lose-water-as-wells-run-dry-in-drought-ravaged-basin/]('https://www.pressherald.com/2021/07/29/homes-in-west-lose-water-as-wells-run-dry-in-drought-ravaged-basin/')

By GILLIAN FLACCUS and NATHAN HOWARD July 29, 2021
[[IMG alt="Water Wars Dry Wells"]https://multifiles.pressherald.com/uploads/sites/10/2021/07/Water_Wars_Dry_Wells_55875.jpg[/IMG]]('')
Rylee Buckley, 17, fills a 7-gallon water container with a neighbor’s hose Saturday, July 24, 2021, in Klamath Falls, Ore. Her family’s house well ran dry in May following a historic drought in southern Oregon. Nathan Howard/Associated Press

MALIN, Ore. — Judy and Jim Shanks know the exact date their home’s well went dry – June 24.

Since then, their life has been an endless cycle of imposing on relatives for showers and laundry, hauling water to feed a small herd of cattle and desperately waiting for a local well-drilling company to make it to their name on a monthslong wait list.

The couple’s well is among potentially hundreds that have dried up in recent weeks in an area near the Oregon-California border suffering through a historic drought, leaving homes with no running water just a few months after the federal government shut off irrigation to hundreds of the region’s farmers for the first time ever.

Officials have formal reports of 117 empty wells but suspect more than 300 have gone dry in the past few weeks as the consequences of the Klamath River basin’s water scarcity extend far beyond farmers’ fields.
Worried homeowners face waits of six months or more to get new, deeper wells dug because of the surging demand, with no guarantee that those wells, too, won’t ultimately go dry.

Some are getting by on the generosity of neighbors, or hauling free water from a nearby city. The state also is sending in a water truck and scrambling to ship more than 350 emergency storage tanks from as far as Oklahoma amid a nationwide shortage of the containers due to drought-induced demand across the U.S. West. The first tanks arrived Thursday.

Judy Shanks, a volunteer ambulance driver, and her husband are surviving on 5-gallon jugs she fills at her mother’s house, and have already sold several cows.

“Come December, if we don’t get some storms in here and we don’t see any changes, I’ll probably sell everything because we can’t hang on,” she said.

While much of the West is experiencing exceptional drought conditions, the toll on everyday life is particularly stark in this region filled with flat vistas of sprawling alfalfa and potato fields and normally teeming wetlands.

This summer’s already critical water shortages have been amplified by a mandate to preserve water levels for two species of endangered suckerfish in a key lake that’s also the primary source of irrigation water for 200,000 acres of farmland.

“It’s kind of hard to look forward and see good things,” said Justin Grant, a farmer who lost irrigation water and whose home now also has a dry well. “I’m trying to wrap my head around how to get through the season.”

In the past, water from Upper Klamath Lake was released each spring from a dam controlled by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and flowed into a vast network of irrigation canals. That system feeds fields converted from marshy lakes to arable land by the government more than a century ago.

The amount of water allocated to farmers varies yearly based on lake levels, and already in recent years it had been reduced.

This year, however, the bureau said because of unusually low lake levels caused by severe drought it could not release any water at all without imperiling the suckerfish. Now, some farmers are drawing instead from deep wells that dot the region, depleting groundwater at the shallower depths tapped by homeowners.

“This is something that you don’t really think of having to deal with in a country like ours,” said Klamath County Commissioner Kelley Minty Morris. “It’s unimaginable to me even though it’s going on right in my community.”

Some water also leaks from the irrigation canals every growing season, superficially replenishing the groundwater. But those canals have run dry, said Brad Kirby, manager of the Tulelake Irrigation District, just south of the California border.

Experts say several factors – years of paltry rain and snow, record-setting heat and raging wildfires driven by climate change – are inexorably changing the region’s ecology.

Oregon’s Water Resources Department, which monitors groundwater levels, recorded the lowest inflow of water ever into the Upper Klamath Lake this spring, setting the stage for a disastrous summer.

“In some wells, we’re seeing a drop of 40 or 50 feet so far this season,” said Ivan Gall, field services administrator for the agency. “It is a lot.”

And there is no guarantee the groundwater will fully recharge when it rains and snows again, he said. In 2010, another year when farmers pumped a lot of groundwater because of drought, the aquifer dropped permanently between 4 and 5 feet, he said.

“You can see how interconnected all of this is,” Gall said, calling it a “cascade effect” of competing demands.

Irrigators drawing on groundwater have irked some homeowners, but the overwhelming focus of anger in this conservative, Republican-leaning community has been the U.S. government and the Endangered Species Act.

Some acknowledge global warming’s role, but most say they are victims of bad government policy in what’s been framed as a battle between farmer and fish. Now, homeowners are in the mix.

“I don’t want to get political about this because I understand everybody’s desire – we’re all just trying to survive. But the environmental policies have killed us here,” said Shanks, the ambulance driver. “We have a drought, I’m not denying that. But we have an even worse man-made drought.”

The two species of suckerfish have been listed as federally endangered since 1988 and are of critical cultural importance to the Klamath Tribes, which have fought for decades to preserve them. The tribes’ studies show that if nothing changes, the fish will disappear from the lake within a generation.

“Archeological evidence has us here for 14,000 years. Our world view, our traditional world view, is everything was placed here for a purpose, including us, and those fish that were created for us were to provide for our subsistence,” said Klamath Tribes Chairman Don Gentry.

With fields and now wells drying up, and the fish struggling, everyone is wondering where to go from here.

[[IMG alt="APTOPIX Water Wars Dry Wells"]https://multifiles.pressherald.com/uploads/sites/10/2021/07/APTOPIX_Water_Wars_Dry_Wells_34864.jpg[/IMG]]('')
Misty Buckley carries dirty water from her animals’ pens to water plants in her front yard Saturday in Klamath Falls, Ore. The Buckleys’ house well ran dry in May following a historic drought in southern Oregon. Dozens of domestic wells have gone dry in an area near the Oregon-California border where the American West’s worsening drought has taken a particularly dramatic toll. Nathan Howard/Associated Press

Nathan Buckley was on a camping trip on Memorial Day weekend when his wife called him to say their sprinkler had stopped running and the kitchen faucet was dry.

A pump specialist told them they had an inch of water left in their 180-foot well. The only solution, he said, was to dig a deeper well – but well-drilling companies in the rural region are few, and the wait for service is at least six months.

The Buckleys are now hauling up to 45 gallons of water a day from neighbors for their four horses, a miniature pony and 14 goats that their daughter shows competitively. They have borrowed a 550-gallon water tank that they use for limited showers and laundry; Nathan Buckley hauls it into town every five days on a borrowed trailer to fill it up.

Buckley has spent weeks pulling records and using Google Earth to map every well within a quarter-mile of his house and now knows his own well is about a quarter-mile from a dry irrigation ditch.

“What if we spend $25,000 or $30,000 right now putting a well in, and next year it goes dry again? Then what? My gut says it’s a remote possibility,” he said. “But it is a possibility.”

Some homeowners, however, take an even broader view as their lawns die and they pay tens of thousands for new wells.

“You hear the word ‘unprecedented’ so many times that it loses its impact, but really, this is not normal,” said Roger Smith, a retired fish biologist who also must dig a deeper well after his went dry this summer.
“There’s been anger in the Klamath Basin for so long,” he said. “If this goes on for a few more years, some of these small communities will cease to exist.”

Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing? - H. D. Thoreau
Veni. Vidi. Cepi. - with apologies to Gaius Julius Caesar

👍

AdmiralOriginal Crew21,717 postsSince 2018

jpdMOD

noreaster.com2021#1537

[URL unfurl="true"]https://nypost.com/2021/07/29/canadian-authorities-mistake-womans-burnt-body-for-mannequin/[/URL]

A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns- Mario Puzo

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CommodoreOriginal Crew9,876 postsSince 2018

Roccus7MOD

noreaster.com2021#1538

Bezos' Bubble Burst in the Battle of the Billionaires...
[HEADING=2][/HEADING]
[HEADING=2]Bezos loses appeal of NASA’s plans to use Musk moon lander[/HEADING]
[pressherald.com/2021/07/30/bezos-loses-appeal-of-nasas-plans-to-use-musk-moon-lander/]('https://www.pressherald.com/2021/07/30/bezos-loses-appeal-of-nasas-plans-to-use-musk-moon-lander/')

By SETH BORENSTEIN July 30, 2021
[[IMG alt="Moon Lander Appeal"]https://multifiles.pressherald.com/uploads/sites/10/2021/07/Moon_Lander_Appeal_61284.jpg[/IMG]]('')
This illustration shows the SpaceX Starship human lander design that will carry the first NASA astronauts to the surface of the Moon under the Artemis program. SpaceX/NASA via AP

The federal government Friday rejected an appeal by billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to get in on NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon by using rival Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

NASA in April awarded the $2.9 billion contract for a lunar lander to the more established SpaceX, which also offered a cheaper price than the bids from Blue Origin and Dynetics Inc., a subsidiary of Leidos. The two losing companies appealed the contract to the Government Accountability Office on the grounds that there should have been multiple contracts and that the proposals weren’t evaluated correctly, but the agency rejected their request.

The decision will allow “NASA and SpaceX to establish a timeline for the first crewed landing on the moon in more than 50 years,” NASA said in a statement Friday, calling a moon landing a priority of the Biden administration.

Friday’s ruling found that even though NASA originally said it was going to give multiple contracts, it didn’t have enough money and that awarding only one contract was legal. Plus, it found NASA’s evaluation of all three bids “was reasonable, and consistent with applicable procurement law regulation and the announcement terms,” according to a statement by GAO lawyer Kenneth Patton.

SpaceX’s bid had the highest rating while the other bids “were significantly higher in price” with the space agency deciding it couldn’t afford to give out multiple contracts as originally planned, the GAO announcement said.

Blue Origin, which has been trying to get Congress to require a second lander contract, still hopes NASA will change its mind and provide “simultaneous competition,” said company spokesperson Linda Mills.
“We stand firm in our belief that there were fundamental issues with NASA’s decision, but the GAO wasn’t able to address them due to their limited jurisdiction,” Mills said in a statement. “We continue to advocate for two immediate providers as we believe it is the right solution.”

The lunar lander is part of the agency’s beyond-Earth exploration plans, refocused on the moon by the Trump administration. The Artemis program involves a new huge rocket that would launch four astronauts aboard an Orion space capsule to the moon’s orbit. The lander would take two astronauts to the moon’s surface, where they’d explore for about a week, hook back up with Orion in lunar orbit and return to Earth.

The SpaceX lander, called Starship, “includes a spacious cabin” and can be expanded to a fully reusable launch system for travel to the moon, Mars and other places, NASA said when it awarded the contract.
A test flight of the capsule, without astronauts aboard, is scheduled for this year, with a test flight by astronauts to the moon – but without a landing – planned for 2023, according to NASA.

Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing? - H. D. Thoreau
Veni. Vidi. Cepi. - with apologies to Gaius Julius Caesar

👍

AdmiralOriginal Crew21,717 postsSince 2018

waderFREE2021#1539

[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/news/bacon-may-disappear-california-pig-141827828.html[/URL]

"Well, it's alright.
.............even if you're old and gray."
"Well, it's alright.
............you still got something to say."

👍

AdmiralOriginal Crew20,900 postsSince 2018

waderFREE2021#1540

I don't know if it was both at the same time or separately.

[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/news/west-virginias-governor-disturbed-information-131706849.html[/URL]

"Well, it's alright.
.............even if you're old and gray."
"Well, it's alright.
............you still got something to say."

👍

AdmiralOriginal Crew20,900 postsSince 2018

Thread

the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread