SPACED OUT

I made it to Lisbon about 7:00 am this morning and it took an hour to get through passport control. I got to my hotel near the center of the city by 9:00 am and they told me to come back at 1:00 pm. Of course I had not slept at all on the plane. I was reading a sad but excellent book about the US government extermination of the Apache Indians in Arizona and New Mexico during the late 1800's. Has a very familiar ring to it as I see parallels to Iraq and Afghanistan today. "Peace thru superior fire power" they call it at the Pentagon.

So after the hotel told me to cool my heels I walked to a nearby park and stretched out on a bench and watched the pigeons fly over me for a couple hours - of course just waiting for them to drop something white and wet on me but gladly they did not. I finally got into my room by 1:30 pm and took a nap. The hotel charges about $15 a day for Internet connection so I passed that up and went to a local MacDonalds that only charges half that amount.

I've seen bits of news about the space station being in danger from space junk. Years ago I remember reading an article where a scientist predicted the space station would be destroyed by space junk before it was ever completed. Remember that originally the station was to cost $10 billion but today the price tag has grown to $100 billion and not yet finished....that is real money.

In the hotel room I turned on the TV and found CNN just as they were reporting on Japan's threats to shoot the North Korean missile launch out of the sky. You should know that if Japan does try to do such a provocative thing they will use an Aegis destroyer outfitted with "missile defense" systems on-board. Of all the MD programs it is the Aegis system that has had the most success in the testing phase. It was an Aegis destroyer that the US used last year to knock out the falling military satellite that was supposed to be a danger to the Earth. (It was later disclosed, but not widely reported, that the hydrazine fuel on that military satellite was nearly used up as it fell to Earth. Clearly an anti-satellite test and not about protecting the planet as the Pentagon claimed at the time.) CNN said that North Korea is set to launch their rocket around April 1 - our Global Network space organizing conference in South Korea will be mid-April so we are walking into a firestorm in that region.

My question again is what right does Japan (and the US who is of course encouraging Japan's aggressive behavior) have to tell another nation when they can and cannot launch rockets? The US does it all the time. I hope the public is not falling for the bravado and is seeing the glaring hypocrisy here.