Anomaly

 

                Photo: NASA TV
ROCKET FIRE: Yesterday, we waited eagerly for Orbital Science Corp.'s launch of Cygnus 3 on a cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station. In the last moments, the launch was scrubbed, due to a wayward sailboat wandering into the safe zone off the coast of Virginia. Stupid boat.

Today, Orbital was geared up and ready to go, and we were watching again. As the clock ticked down I told the kids how much I loved hearing "t-minus" anything, and we waited and watched.

Right at the appointed time, the Antares rocket ignited.

At the very first sign of rocket fire, I immediately said aloud to the kids, "Oh no ... something looks wrong."  I wasn't sure. It was something about the fall of the tower, the look of the fire, the speed (or lack thereof) ... ? However, the rocket climbed and cleared the tower and I shrugged and said, "Guess I was wrong."

A couple of seconds later: DISASTER. The rocket catastrophically exploded. 

"I've never seen a rocket explode before," Annabelle said, dumbstruck. Even though we knew no one was on board, it was really rather horrific to watch. 

Understandably, NASA and Orbital aren't posting footage right now, but other people are.

Here's film from the press pool. ... 


And here's video a private pilot took over the area ...


We watched the postmortem press conference tonight. Not surprisingly, no real insight regarding the cause of the anomaly was shared tonight. (The press conference is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5HaD5zZjeE&feature=youtu.be. I can't help but wonder if the anomaly is related to the quick turn around time to gear up again after the stupid sailboat-related scrub. Time will tell, I'm sure. 

GOING BATTY: I thought it time to do a little Halloween-y related craft project today. I recalled past positive experiences with tutorials from cartoonist Bruce Blitz. Before, we'd used his ActivityTV tutorials, but today, we found his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/BruceBlitzArt/videos

There, I found a tutorial about drawing a bat. (Bonus, it actually had a little educational info at the beginning.)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNWx0sKGC1A&list=UUYKfVh538_ecquRli35xH4g  As a bonus, there was a little educational info about bats at the begninning of the video.


The kids enjoyed following his directions, which are always easy to understand. 

Here's Bee's Bruce Blitz-inspired bat ...

And here is CJ's interesting variation. ...

While searching for Bruce Blitz tutorials, we discovered an artist named Shoo Rayner who also had a bat-drawing tutorial on YouTube. Rayner is an award winning British children's author and illustrator. (His Web site, Shoorayner.com is worth checking out, by the way.)  And so, the kids followed Shoo's advice. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhTEOlOUk4Y

Here's Annabelle Rayner-inspired bat in progress. ... 

I was interested to read on Rayner's Web site that he's interested in particle physics, and especially string theory. To that end, he's working on a project called Shoowaii, "creating a mirror to the world we know." This alternative universe has its own Web site, of course: http://www.shoowaii.com/

But I digress. ... 

OTHER PROJECTS: As Annabelle was working on her book project, I asked CJ to write a story about one of the bats he'd drawn. Here's what he came up with about his two-tone bat.

Once, there was a bat. This bat wore a mask sterotypically worn by comic superheroes. His name was Bat-Bat, a rather uncreative name given to him by his creator. He wasn't technically a real bat, because he was just a drawing made by his creator, the only things that ever truly happened to him were things that his creator decided to do with him. Here's the story of how he got to the way he looks now, half-colored.

One day, a drawing of Bat-Bat was placed near some pastels. Bat-Bat looked at the pastels, when suddenly, the box was spilled over. This inspired the creator to color some of Bat-Bat, deciding to make half of him blue. This made Bat-Bat very happy, even happy enough to sprout out of the paper he was drawn on and fly around Seattle.

In Seattle, Bat-Bat flew around, discovering Seattle Center. In Seattle Center, Bat-Bat saw the Space Needle, and flew to the pinnacle of it. Many people saw the two-tone bat, and most of those people got very curious about it.

When Bat-Bat finally came down, so many people were amazed by the sight of the unusually colored bat. People asked Bat-Bat to stand on their shoulders so they could take a once-in-a-lifetime picture with him (though many, if not most pictures of people with Bat-Bat on their shoulders that circulated on the internet following that event just had Bat-Bat photoshopped in from other people's pictures). After that, Bat-Bat flew inside Center School and greeted many students there.

At his home, Bat-Bat's creator was shocked at how much internet publicity that his own creation, Bat-Bat, received, but his problem was that no one would believe him when he tried to tell them that he drew Bat-Bat originally, so following that, he posted a disclaimer on a social networking site saying that he created Bat-Bat, and his evidence was a photograph he took of his drawing of Bat-Bat when he was just a drawing on paper.

In the end, it's safe to say that Bat-Bat became very popular among Seattlites.