Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 81. Sunrise is 5:23 and sunset is 8:35 for 15 hours 12 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning gibbous with 63.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1885, Louis Pasteur successfully tests his vaccine against rabies on Joseph Meister, a boy who was bitten by a rabid dog.
We are a bold and ambitious people. On Friday, NASA launched the Swift mission to restore a space telescope to its proper orbit:
A three-armed spacecraft rocketed into orbit Friday to rescue a NASA telescope that’s in danger of crashing back to Earth.
Northrop Grumman launched Katalyst Space Technologies’ Link spacecraft from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. The Pegasus rocket blasted off from the belly of a modified airplane, putting Link on course to reach and capture NASA’s Swift Observatory in about a month.
Launched in 2004, Swift is sinking faster than ever because of recent solar storms. NASA is paying $30 million for Katalyst to capture the telescope and boost its orbit so it can continue tracking some of the biggest explosions in the universe, like gamma ray bursts and exploding stars.
If all goes well, Swift could be back scanning the cosmos by September. Observations are currently on hold to preserve the telescope’s orbit as long as possible.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope could be a candidate for a similar salvage operation in a few years. It’s also slipping in altitude because of increased atmospheric drag caused by the sun’s outbursts.
The 1.6-ton (1.4-metric ton) Swift currently is circling 224 miles (360 kilometers) above Earth. Katalyst aims to raise the telescope’s altitude by 150 miles (240 kilometers), back to where it all began. Link’s thrusters will fire to boost Swift slowly, so there’s no heavy jostling.
Katalyst threw the mission together in just nine months. NASA insisted on a rush job because the telescope will be too low to recover by the fall. Without a boost, it’s predicted to plunge to its demise in October.
See Marcia Dunn, Rescue mission launches to save NASA telescope that’s falling back to Earth thanks to solar storms, Associated Press, July 3, 2026.
How odd, how strange, and how contrary to the American character that a small faction in this beautiful city cannot even imagine more housing for residents. A recent NASA mission to another world used Theodore Roosevelt’s exhortation ‘Dare Mighty Things’ as its motto. Yet, in Whitewater, an enervated and exhausted few, self-interested in opposing new projects, insist that Americans shouldn’t even build homes. We have been to other worlds; we can build more homes on this one.
If new homes in an American town are too hard for someone, then anything in America is too hard. This nation is not the place dull and dilatory. Those who oppose even America’s minimum are free to seek a less productive, less energetic society.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and a New Ethics Ordinance.
Paris residents swim in the Seine in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower: