Banquet

Happy Thanksgiving week in the US! Most of NASA took the week off, though last Wednesday at Johnson Space Center was a banquet featuring the ST-135 crew. Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin is in the foreground wearing glasses. Dr. Grifin had some choice remarks about the current direction of NASA.

Astronaut Sandy Magnus, one of the first people I met upon coming to JSC. Author Gloria Skurzynski also received an award for her writings about Space.. How nice to live in a world where women can dream about the stars.

Ballunar

Happy Halloween! October 21-23 was the annual Ballunar Festival in Johnson Space Center, which proves that some sort of "inflation" exists. Saturday and Sunday morning the balloons were released in an impromptu race. Here they drift right by my lanai. The evening was celebrated with music and a balloon glow.

The balloons' shape disproves one tenet of cosmic inflation, that the universe is flat like the Earth. As a balloon fills with hot air, tension of the envelope pulls it into a spherical shape. In the universe, that tension is provided by gravity. The 3 dimensions that we move in can be thought of as the envelope of a 4-dimensional expanding universe. Thinkers from Pascal to Einstein and even Edgar Allan Poe have thought the universe is a sphere. The shape of a balloon is much more beautiful than flatness.