‘The Martian’, Ridley Scott (2015) In The Face Of Overwhelming Odds, I’m Left With Only One Option,

The Apollo Soyuz Test project was the first docking of an American spacecraft to a Soviet one. With the historic docking occurring in July of 1975, the mission was the last flight of the Apollo Command and Service module, and the only flight of Mercury 7 astronaut Deke Slayton, who had been grounded from the Mercury and Gemini programs as a result of a heart murmur. American spacecraft would later dock with Russian spacecraft once more when Commander Hoot Gibson docked Space Shuttle Atlantis to the Russian Mir space station in the mid 1990s as the beginning of the Shuttle-Mir program. The Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and NASA would later work together once more not too long afterwards to build the International Space Station, a merger project which originally was two separate space stations called Mir-2 and Freedom as well as the planned European and Japanese modules onboard Freedom, and Canadian hardware such as the Canadarm (no seriously, that's legitimately what it's called).

It all started with a Big Bang...

The origins of the universe

U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

Actually, there is no reason either to go to your local theatre or to leave this galaxy for another one far away if you want to know what happened a long time ago in our universe. You can travel back in time and space to the microseconds following the Big Bang, with the answers found by DOE nuclear physicists working at our National Laboratories and universities.

The Big Bang

Everything we know in the universe – planets, people, stars, galaxies, gravity, matter and antimatter, energy and dark energy – all date from the cataclysmic Big Bang. While it was over in fractions of a second, a region of space the size of a single proton vastly expanded to form the beginnings of our universe.

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Happy Carldays!

Sweatshirts available through December at TeeFury.

by Pacalin

In Defense of Holden Caulfield

I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever understand why exactly people hate Holden Caulfield from “The Catcher in the Rye”.

I mean, sure, you could defend your dislike with a classic gem such as, “Oh, he’s just a whiny, pretentious f***boy! He’s so boring, all he does is complain!”

But at that I’m just like

okay, wow, I’m sorry the incredibly depressed mentally ill teenager who has no true friends and is constantly being ignored by the people he tries to reach out to and is constantly being told he’s useless and a bad influence by his peers and has alluded to being sexually molested by multiple people as a little kid and has to deal with the pain and hardship of growing up in a world he can’t help but see as superficial and hypocritical and WHOSE CLASSMATE FRICKIN’ COMMITTED SUICIDE IN FRONT OF HIM isn’t a conventionally cheerful or likeable protagonist????

I don’t understand why that’s so hard for people to grasp; it just straight up BAFFLES me. I mean, people eke out all sorts of ways to like downright villains like Alex (DeLarge) or Loki or Ramsay Snow/Bolton, or antiheros like Jaime/Cersei Lannister, Sherlock Holmes, etc.

Why is it so hard to dole out a little sympathy for Holden, who, ultimately, just wants to protect children from the evils of the world—arguably one of the noblest and most heartbreakingly tender aspirations of all?

‘Space Station and Shuttle’ (1981) by Jack Olsen for Boeing Aerospace. From the book Visions of Space by David Hardy (1989)

The Big Bang Theory Merchandise: http://bit.ly/1aAdDNX

NASA’S NEW SPACE TOURISM POSTERS ARE OUT OF THIS WORLD

Global Map of Pluto

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-forever.

O'Brien, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four