Some items in my posting queue:
** The METEORITE Pen by B. Smith & Co. — Kickstarter
Participants in this crowd-funding campaign will help get a meteorite penmaker venture off the ground and get discounts on pens as well.
We are proud to offer you a Kickstarter exclusive first edition B. Smith & Co. fountain pen. Our Meteorite pen manufacturing process has been completely redesigned to more elegantly highlight the cosmic beauty of this rare material. You will enjoy it for a lifetime.
Your fountain pen will be meticulously handcrafted with high quality black titanium plated hardware featuring pen and cap barrels encrusted with actual Campo del Cielo meteorite that had traveled across the cosmos, in space, for billions of years. It crashed to earth in a fireball 4,000-6,000 years ago before being discovered more than 400 years ago.
Each pen will be carefully fitted with a fine point two-tone stainless steel nib manufactured in Germany by Jowo, one of the world’s largest suppliers of fountain pen nibs, and will include two methods of filling the ink supply– a standard cartridge and a piston converter.
Please keep in mind that every order is individually handcrafted and therefore no two pens will be exactly alike, although they will look very similar. We take great pride in our craftsmanship and guarantee your pen will be just as beautiful as you would expect, hopefully more!
** Space Job Fair – Bernd Weis founded this service
to enable everybody to launch a career in space-related companies. I work day and night to get more companies to participate and to present their openings, to get more universities involved, and to help companies at every stage to find the best possible candidates.
The Space Job Fair grew in less than 1 year from a virtual only event to a full university hosted job fair. With having a hybrid career event, where companies can promote their openings and candidates can present themselves, we created a unique experience to get value for everyone participating. Hybrid means, it is hosted by a university and all presentations are streamed online and a participation is possible from everywhere (internet access required). Our modular and hybrid approach enables us to deliver an easy yet powerful sourcing solution and give universities the chance to bring more international openings to their students.
** Winston Churchill’s essay on ET
Churchill was a soldier, a wartime leader, an author, a historian, and a talented participant in various other vocations. Turns out he was also quite informed about scientific topics and recently an essay was found that he had written in 1930 on the possibilities of life beyond earth:
From the end of Churchill’s piece:
“[W]ith hundreds of thousands of nebulae, each containing thousands of millions of suns, the odds are enormous that there must be immense numbers which possess planets whose circumstances would not render life impossible. I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilization here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures, or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time.”
BTW: My wife and I recently listened to the audio version of Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill
by Candice Millard. It’s a wonderfully well written account of just a few of the amazing episodes in an amazing life.
** 9 NASA Inventions That You Actually Use Every Day – A list of some NASA spinoffs.
. He discusse the many NewSpace developments of the past several years and looks especially at the emergence of commercial launch facilities:
by