Space and Daisies

SUN TIMES: This week shall be declared The War of the Daisies. There are hundreds and hundreds of them lining our driveway and  beyond. When we first moved in - four years ago this week - the daisies popping up here and there in mid summer were a nice surprise.

Now, they basically have overtaken the whole front planting bed, from street to front door, and some of them - in fact, most of them -  simply have to go. The photo above is just a four foot swath of what is about 40 feet of driveway to door daisies, plus the depth of the bed from the driveway to the front yard retaining wall or our front door ranges from three to about 15-feet. 

If you do a little Googling you find out that daisies have a fibrous root system. Basically, they grow like grass. To quote one site, "...  perennials have roots that continue to grow for years, even as newer roots develop."

Super.

For the past three days, I've spent a couple of hours or more a day battling the daisy invaders. 

All the while, I can't help but wonder if all my sweaty efforts will seem for naught next spring, when those fibrous roots start ramping up again. I mean, sure, I'm digging like crazy and working SUPER hard to get as much/many of the roots I can, but the network is ridiculous. I feel like I'm getting *maybe* 50 percent.  Time will tell. 

In happier garden news, we have a 4-plus foot sunflower about to come to fruition. 

                                  

And a wee little sunflower planted from a seed has already blossomed for us.

SO SPACED OUT: We made sure to tune in early Sunday morning for the manned flight of Spaceship Two, with Virgin Galatic's Richard Branson on board. 

Branson has been trying to get to space for what feels like decades. With the successful flight of SpaceShip Two, Virgin Galactic has finally made a giant leap toward commercial suborbital spaceflight. 

This flight was nearly two-decades in the making. It was 2004 when Richard Branson first announced Virgin Galactic.

Branson was joined by three crewmates and two pilots for the historic flight, dubbed Unity 22, which started when SpaceShip Two was carried by Virgin Galactic's enormous plane VMS Eve. This mission was the 22nd flight of Unity, but only the craft's fourth launch to the edge of space. 

The take off and landing were at the company's homeport of Spaceport America near Las Cruces, New Mexico.

The craft flew to an altitude above 50 miles (80 km), which NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. military officially classify as space. Given that, each person on board earned "astronaut wings." 

You can watch a reply of CNBC's coverage of the event here:

Virgin Galactic already has a roster of future customers, many of whom have already reserved trips to space at $250,000 a seat. Paid passenger flights are expected to commence in 2022, after a few more test flights.

If you want to hop on board but dropping a quarter million dollars isn't in the cards for you, consider entering a contest to win a seat on an upcoming mission (deadline to enter is August 31, 2021). Link here: https://www.omaze.com/products/virgin-galactic-2021

Meanwhile, Boeing's Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) is taking off soon. Scheduled to lift off on  Friday, July 30 from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 11:53 a.m. West Coast (US) time, Boeing’s Orbital Flight Test-2 is the CST-100 Starliner’s second uncrewed flight test. If all goes as planned, it will dock to the International Space Station as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. 

The uncrewed mission will test the capabilities of Starliner and \ United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket from launch to docking to a return of the capsule to Earth in the desert of the western U.S.  While there won't be any humans on board, Rosie the Rocketeer, Boeing’s anthropometric test device, will be in the commander’s seat inside the Starliner for its second uncrewed Orbital Flight Test.

You can register online to follow along with the mission here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nasas-boeing-oft-2-launch-registration-159640257307?aff=invite