Morning, now that is almost isn’t!

This is an unusual morning with a pile of stories down on the picnic table, some groggy members of the Socotra House Creative scowling at their still-steaming Chock Full O’ Nuts in the assortment of ceramic mugs celebrating ships long consigned as sunken reefs, bars now turned into multi-use residential buildings and the logos of proud commands disestablished to save scarce operating funds.

We are supposed to be concentrating on politics, right? We have talked about little else for the last six years, so we are going to take a brief pause. One campaign is in a developmental phase. An older candidate was having some cognitive issue- public ones- and was dumped unceremoniously with his replacement announced, not elected.There are some problems with that, apparently, since although poised and attractive, the candidate has trouble speaking extemporaneously.

There are attempts in progress to turn that around, and we will be talking about that effort for the next three weeks.

What is in the messaging mix of the morning? The Campaign, of course. Momentum has changed in the messages. So, with that now a naked sort of issue on the table, the rhetoric is likely to reflect new urgency. As if it hasn’t been since around 2016.

It made us turn to something from the times that shaped our lives and the way we have lived them. In the early days we had something called “The Space Race.“ Today is the anniversary of Chuck Yeager’s flight in the X-1 jet he named “Glamorous Glennis.” Aeronautical engineering suddenly became sexy.

Sputnik’s dramatic arrival on orbit made rockets sensual, and the race to replace it with other orbiting things galvanized our youthful dreams. Watching lift offs from Cape Canaveral were a part of elementary school education. But that might just have been part of the supersonic epic of things hurtling through space.

That is the Tic Tac tale. There is new messaging about the Pentagon’s UFO data retrieval program. It has been a low-key affair, cloaked in the folds of other budget items not subject to Congressional oversight since 2017. Or so the whistleblower reports claim. The stories about program “Immaculate Constellation” are curious things. The program is supposed to have been established to ‘detect’ and ‘quarantine’ the best UFO imagery, videos, eyewitness testimonies and electronic sensor evidence.

Apparently, there is some. The published images were striking, showing the instrument symbology on the screens of the FA-18 jets who detected them. The pilots described the objects as resembling the oblong white candy mints known to improve breath quality. “Tik Tacs” then evolved to became “Special Access” above the ordinary Top Secret stuff being denied yesterday.

Why? Similar efforts started the same year Chuck Yeager flew Glennis. In June, 1947, civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects moving at high speed over Washington’s stately Mount Rainier. They were not ours, so there was some interest.

Similar, widely publicized reports led the U.S. Air Force to begin an investigation in 1948 called “Operation Sign.’ That initial investigation resulted in the creation of Project Blue Book in 1952, the median year of a decade of birth for some of the Salts around the table. Blue Book compiled 12,000 reports before being shut down in 1969.

Which marked the official end of the Flying Saucer craze. The official part, anyway, or at least the part the officials talked about. Which is part of the Tic Tac part, now accompanied by official denials.

The other space news eclipses the messaging about the third armed gunman detained at a Trump rally yesterday. People searching for Tic Tacs tell us an object the size of a school bus fell into Earth’s orbit last month and will remain there until after Thanksgiving. The experts say it is an asteroid and only a temporary moon, so there are no plans to send anything to land on it.

But that was only the theme music to other things going up. And coming down

Which is the story from yesterday that makes the Tic Tac Tale something quite new. And astonishingly successful.

Elon Musk is one of those people in several of the data streams. Politics is just one of them. His aerospace stuff is more profound, His SpaceX rocket successfully completed the fifth test flight. Launched from South Texas, it splashed down in the Indian Ocean after an hour’s flight.

We have done that as a group, though individually and at lower speed than that of the world’s largest and most powerful rocket. What was more interesting was the recovery of a big chunk of the booster rocket in a first-ever “chopstick” landing.

That is the shorthand to describe something more complicated. Part of the 233-foot Super Heavy rocket booster (SHRB) was caught by two massive mechanical arms extending from the launch tower.

Returned safely to Earth to a tower like the one that launched it. Up, and then Down.

Now there is something we do not to have to look up to see what is coming to aim other rockets to blow it apart. This one is landing, peacefully, among us.

Maybe there is hope, you know? The Tic Tac Tale is interesting.

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com