Search this site
Matching entries from BatesLine
Eclipse 2024 notes
Composite image of August 21, 2017, total solar eclipse, Madras, Oregon. Photo Credit: (NASA/Aubrey Gemignani) Monday, April 8, 2024, will be the nearest a total solar eclipse has come to Tulsa in my lifetime. The path of totality stretches from south Texas to northern New England. Oklahoma southeast of...
Oklahoma Primary 2022: Federal races
More short takes, this time on the races for Federal office on the June 28, 2022, Oklahoma Republican primary ballot: Both Senate seats, an open race in the 2nd Congressional District, and challenges to incumbents in Districts 3, 4, and 5. If you're on the home page, click the "Continue...
Spanish Flu in Oklahoma, 1918: Avoid osculation
The earliest reference to Spanish flu or influenza in the Oklahoma Historical Society's Digital Newspapers Collection is from page 4 of the August 31, 1918, edition of the Daily Ardmoreite. The flu is still a far-off thing, but near enough to be worthy of some advice: INFLUENZA AND OSCULATION If...
Apollo 11 50th anniversary: Events near Tulsa
In addition to watching commemorations on television and online, Tulsans have several options nearby and within a day's drive for remembering the 50th anniversary of mankind's first steps on the moon. The 2019 Oklahoma Aviation and Space Trail links the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, the Oklahoma History Center in...
Apollo 11 50th anniversary: Video, audio, and documents from 1969 and today
For folks of my age and older, watching men walk on the moon for the first time was an unforgettable thrill. Happily, through the wonders of the internet, there are many ways you can relive that experience and share it with the Gen Xers and later generations that missed...
Apollo 8: From the Moon at Christmas, 50 years ago
A half-century ago, three American astronauts became the first humans to orbit the moon. On Christmas eve, during a global broadcast estimated to have been heard by a quarter of the Earth's population, the crew of Apollo 8 -- Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders -- read from the...
Covering tracks: Kevin Hern and the Republican Main Street Partnership
Grassroots activists who support Kevin Hern for Oklahoma's 1st Congressional Candidate say they've been told by the candidate and his campaign that he never accepted the endorsement of the crony-capitalist, open-borders Republican Main Street Partnership or donations from the organization's affiliated Republican Mainstreet Partnership PAC. (Note the subtle difference --...
Is Kevin Hern "deceptively liberal"?
Did Kevin Hern really give $17,000 to a PAC that donates to far-left Democrats? Here's the rest of the story.
Okie Boogie remix
A reader sends along this interesting remix of "Oakie Boogie" by a Bristol-based DJ called Howla. (That's Bristol, England -- another indication of the international audience for western swing and related genres of American music.) The song "Oakie Boogie" (spelled "Okie Boogie" after the "a" was dropped from the toponym),...
Apollo 13: 45th anniversary
We often speak of scientific 'miracles' - forgetting that these are not miraculous happenings at all, but rather the product of hard work, long hours and disciplined intelligence. The men and Women of the Apollo XIII mission operations team performed such a miracle, transforming potential tragedy into one of the...
State Sudafed system SNAFU; snuffly Sooners suffer
It's cold season, and Oklahoma's whipsaw weather has Sooner noggins clogged with snot and in search of a solution. A few minutes ago at a nearby chain drug store, I heard one of the assistants say that, at the moment, no one in the state of Oklahoma can buy products...
Gene Kranz: Obama "wrote the epitaph for manned space flight"
I saw an article today that made me aware of a missed opportunity. Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the safe return to Earth of Apollo 13, and the Cosmosphere -- just a short four hours from Tulsa in Hutchinson, Kansas, and home to the mission's command module, Odyssey, hosted...
Apollo 11 -- forty years ago
I was five years old, but I got to stay up late to watch the moon walk. We were at my grandparents' house in Nowata. My grandpa sold and repaired TVs, radios, and appliances (Johnny's Electronics), so he had a color TV. (We wouldn't have one for a few years...
Not dead yet
Yes, I'm still alive, despite not posting to the main blog in a few days. (You might have noticed that I have published some items on the linkblog in the meantime.) It's been a busy (and sick) few days for our family. My wife has a chest cold. The 15-month-old...
Flu; Barrs
Our 10-year-old was running a degree of fever Friday morning, so we kept him home from school. This morning he was at 104, was coughing, aching, and congested, and he threw up, so I took him to the urgent care center. They were very efficient at processing us in, and...
Down without Pitney
'60s pop singer and songwriter Gene Pitney died early Wednesday of a heart attack in Cardiff, Wales, where he had performed the night before. In 1993, Dawn Eden interviewed Pitney for Goldmine magazine; today National Review Online has her reflections on his life and career: When the hits stopped coming,...
Failure is not an option
We've been enjoying this evening's programming on the History Channel: "Failure Is Not an Option", two two-hour documentaries on the U. S. manned spaceflight program, as told by the men and women in Mission Control. The first program covers the beginnings through the end of Project Apollo; the second covers...
Just a little vane
Another excerpt from Angle of Attack by Mike Gray: Like all power-plant engineers, the [NASA] Lewis [Research Center] people labored in obscurity; glory in the airplane business went to the pilot or the builder, and nobody ever remembered the guys who designed the engines that made it all possible. One...
<i>Angle of Attack</i>: The engineering side of the space race
Just finished reading a fascinating book on Project Apollo, one of a collection of books on the U. S. manned space program that my wife gave me. Angle of Attack by Mike Gray, published by Penguin in 1992, tells the story of the effort to reach the moon as it...
Aieeee! Moon turns to blood!
Most of the world will be able to see a total lunar eclipse tonight -- the last one until 2007. Totality begins at 9:23 pm Central Daylight Time and ends at 10:45 pm. This sign in the heavens can mean only one thing: The Red Sox will finish their...
Feed Subscription
If you use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to a feed of all future entries matching 'NASA'. [What is this?]
