Monica Maeckle is a glass-half-full kind of gal.
How else to take her pronouncement about the Monarch butterfly on Tuesday night, that their ”migration is endangered, but the butterfly is not”?
It feels a little like saying “The Louvre Museum is burning to the ground, but we’ll still have great digital pictures of all the art.”
Frankly, I don’t know quite how I felt after Maeckle spoke as part of the i3 (ideas that inform & inspire) lecture series.
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On Tuesday, A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched, “the company’s 12th rideshare mission to a sun-synchronous orbit. Onboard are a variety of customer satellites, including 35 satellites integrated by Exolaunch along with 36 SuperDoves and Pelican-2 from Planet Labs PBC.”
On Wednesday, SpaceX launches its “sixth, suborbital flight test of its fully integrated Starship rocket, a combination of the Ship upper stage (S33) and the Super Heavy booster (B14). SpaceX plans to catch the Super Heavy booster using the chopsticks on the launch tower, but will make a final determination on the catch following liftoff and stage separation.”
On Thursday, a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket will launch the company’s previously delayed Blue Ring spacecraft, which is capable of both hosting and deploying multiple payloads.
(Source: spaceflightnow.com See update at bottom of this page.)
Also on Tuesday, space and security expert Dr. Nancy K. Hayden discussed the future of outer space and the increasingly heavy and chaotic traffic that is shooting out of planet Earth like hair plugs out of Elon Musk’s head.
Her talk for the i3: ideas that inform and inspire‘s Conversations with Big Thinkers lecture series at La Casona Event Center was first promoted as “Space: Brave New World or Wild Wild West?” Somewhere along the line, out of respect for the growing congestion on the extraterrestrial freeways surrounding Earth, she added a third possibility — “Close Encounters” — to that title.
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Back in September, the San Miguel de Allende lecture series “i3: Ideas that Inform and Inspire” announced its new season and among the most-anticipated speakers is veteran journalist and author Hedrick Smith.
His speech, titled “The Road Ahead for American Democracy,” is set for Nov. 19.
Way back in September, the title seemed an anticipation of the celebration that would be democracy in action – a successful election during which the majority of the people would choose as their leader an intelligent, earnest, and compassionate woman over an aging and angry revenge-driven criminal.
That didn’t happen.
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Musings, Magic, San Miguel and More 