Today's Blue Origin flight successful; this Shatner picture is now funny

This morning's suborbital Blue Origin flight, carrying 90-year old William Shatner, a/k/a James Tiberius Kirk, to the edge of space was a success (linking to CNN coverage), and all hands have returned to terra firma whole and intact.

Accordingly, now I can enjoy (and share) this picture:

(Photo obtained from Captain Kirk: The Man, the Myth, the Legend via Facebook.)

October 8: The 150th Anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire

This is an edited reprint of a post that I first ran here on October 7, 2014. Not only is this the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire, I just put up a review of a new book by a college classmate on page one that suggests that Chicago was burned by a band of Confederate die-hards. So, naturally, this post does not address that theory -- but it does provide a number of other anecdotes that the reader may enjoy. Links have been updated or removed where necessary. A lot of the original links are no longer active, seven years down the road.

Currier & Ives lithograph obtained from the Chicago Historical Society

You probably remember that October 8 is the anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire.

State and Madison after the Fire

School children are probably not required to memorize the gruesome statistics of the fire anymore, but they are readily accessible on Wikipedia: The fire destroyed an area about four miles long, averaging averaging 3/4 of a mile in width. Roughly 17,500 buildings were destroyed; property damage was estimated at $222 million. One in every three Chicago residents -- roughly 100,000 of the City's total 300,000 population -- was made homeless by the fire. There were 120 bodies recovered after the fire, but authorities estimated the actual death toll at up to 300.

Most folks don't remember this, but the Chicago fire destroyed the records of two Illinois counties -- Cook, of course, but also DuPage. In 1871 Naperville and Wheaton were literally up in arms over which town should be the seat of DuPage County and the county records were removed to Chicago for safekeeping.

Ooops.

And yet -- believe it or not -- the Great Chicago Fire was, in many ways, the smallest of three major fires in the Midwest on October 8, 1871. Over on the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, a number of cities, including such widely scattered burgs as Holland, Manistee, and Port Huron, were damaged or lost entirely in a series of fires collectively referred to as the Great Michigan Fire. There were not as many lives lost in the Michigan fires, but more land and timber was damaged in these fires.

Mass grave at Peshtigo. © Deana C. Hipke.

There may have been 300 people killed in the Great Chicago Fire, but the mass grave shown in this picture, in a picturesque cemetery next to the converted church that serves as the Peshtigo Fire Museum, is the final resting place of roughly 350 unidentified victims of the Peshtigo Fire.

At least 1,200 people died in the Peshtigo Fire, some 800 in the town of Peshtigo alone (roughly half the population of the town); the total death toll may have been as high as 2,500. Whole families were wiped out; in many cases there was no one left, after the fire, to remember who'd been lost.

The firestorm was so intense that the flames jumped right across Green Bay, damaging large portions of the Door Peninsula. It also spread into the nearby Upper Peninsula of Michigan, ultimately damaging an area twice the size of Rhode Island.

One area that was not involved in the Peshtigo Fire, though it was in the path of the flames, was the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help, in New Franken, Wisconsin.

Many believe that the Virgin Mary appeared at this site on October 9, 1859 to Adele Brise, a young Belgian woman. A church and school were built there because the Virgin told Brise to teach religion to children. In 2014, when this post originally appeared, the website of the Catholic Diocese of Green Bay recounted:

When the Peshtigo Fire spread across Green Bay on Oct. 8, 1871, area residents walked around the chapel grounds all night praying the rosary and carrying a statue of Mary. Everything outside that five-acre area was burned.

Every year on Oct. 8 people reenact the procession at the Shrine.

A church was also saved from disaster in Chicago, too, but that story is somewhat less impressive.

Fr. Arnold Damen, S.J. founded Holy Family Church in 1860 and St. Ignatius College in 1870 (the immediate ancestor of both St. Ignatius College Prep, which is still at the original site, and Loyola University Chicago) in what was then the middle of nowhere. But that isolated location was uncomfortably close to the infamous O'Leary barn when the Great Chicago Fire broke out, only about 3/4 mile away. Cecil Admams picks up the story in a Chicago Reader Straight Dope column from 2009 (emphasis in original):

When the Great Fire began, the wind was blowing out of the southeast. Holy Family and Saint Ignatius were directly west, and arguably would have escaped the flames had conditions remained unchanged, but Father Damen was taking no chances. In the version of the story I initially heard, he stood on the front porch of Saint Ignatius and prayed to the Almighty to spare his life's work. This was embroidery. In reality his prayer was offered up in Brooklyn, where he was preaching at the time. No matter; the Lord could hear him there just as well. Father Damen vowed that if his prayers were answered, he would keep seven vigil lights burning before an image of the Virgin.

The wind shifted. Formerly it had been driving the fire toward the outskirts of town; now it began to blow out of the southwest, pushing the fire northeast. You see the implications of this. The church and school were saved. Instead, the conflagration burned down the rest of Chicago.

But, Adams adds, the City Council did not hold a grduge: Damen Avenue was eventually renamed in Fr. Damen's honor.

How are YOU celebrating World Space Week?

According to the United Nations, World Space Week runs this year, and every year, from October 4-10.

Why? Because on October 4, 1957, the old Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1. Then, on October 10, 1967, the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (sounds like something the UN might draft, doesn't it?) entered into force. (Yes, in case you're wondering, the United States has ratified this treaty.)

So... how are you celebrating this year?

For one of my favorite comic strips, Tim Rickard's Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!, pretty much every week is Space Week. But this week Mr. Rickard is recycling a plot first served up in Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and melding it with the sneering news coverage of billionaires venturing into space:

You may not immediately recall what happened to Ship B of the Golgafrincham Ark Fleet and its millions of telephone sanitizers, hairdressers, "tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, [and] management consultants" -- fully a third of the planet's population -- traveling in suspended animation. (They crash-landed on Earth two million years in the past, leaving the indigenous, evolving hominind population terminally depressed and bound for extinction.)

You likewise may not recall the sad fate of Golgafrincham. (Having conned all the useless members of their society off the planet with wildly varying stories about the planet being doomed -- my favorite was that an enormous mutant star goat was going to eat the planet -- the "other two-thirds stayed firmly at home and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.")

But even without catching the literary reference, most readers will probably smirk right along with the idea that billionaires should be banned from space or, if allowed to go at all, given one-way tickets only. Har har. And let's change the rules about who qualifies for official astronaut wings so that the person who bankrolled Blue Origin, Amazon's obscenely rich Jeff Bezos, can be denied his wings for putting his life at risk riding just past the internationally recognized boundary of outer space on his own rocket. Even though that meant that, once again, Wally Funk was denied official recognition.

In the first modern Age of Exploration, the analogs of the Bezoses and Bransons and Musks of today did not venture out in their wood and canvas ships in search of trade, gold, or glory. Oh, no, they limited their personal risk by staying home, directing affairs from London coffee houses and, in the course thereof, inventing the insurance business to limit their financial risks as well.

Who else -- besides governments -- could afford any sort of space exploration except for these flamboyant, egotistical billionaires? Hate on the uber-rich all you want, but governments have done a lousy job of space exploration because (surprise, surprise) they made it political: Richard Nixon couldn't wait to cancel the Apollo Program at the first possible opportunity precisely because it was perceived as the signature achievement of the Kennedy Administration. And the pattern hasn't changed any time the White House has changed hands: The new administration will announce its own grand plan -- and cancel those wasteful plans promulgated by its predecessor. It's a wonder the Space Shuttle ever launched or the International Space Station ever got built. But, by now, it must be no suprise to even the dullest among us that next year will mark the 50th anniversary of humankind's last trip to the Moon.

Compare that, if you will, to the development of aviation in the 50 years following Kitty Hawk. Governments contributed substantially to the development of aviation in that first half-century (see, World War I and World War II) but governments did not completely control it. As the governmental death-grip on spaceflight has lessened in recent years, even only slightly, the pace of development has finally quickened. And is becoming ever more rapid.

Which brings us back again to Wally Funk. This summer Funk became the oldest person ever to fly in space (at 82, she was five years older than was John Glenn, when he made his second trip to Earth orbit, in 1998, aboard the space shuttle Discovery).

If all goes as planned, Wally Funk's record will fall this coming Tuesday, October 12, when William Shatner, 90, better known as James Tiberius Kirk, will boldly go to space in a sub-orbital flight aboard another Blue Origin capsule.

Which leads to the funniest take I have seen about Shatner's upcoming flight. This is from an often funny, if sometimes juvenile, Facebook site called Captain Kirk, The Man, the Myth, the Legend:

OK... so I'm a nerd. But, if you got this far, maybe you are, too. In which case, live long and prosper, and enjoy the rest of World Space Week.