Voyager Mission Quotes

Christianity without mission is like ice cream without frozenness.

The voyages of the great Chinese fleet were missions of exploration and commerce. They were not enterprises of conquest. No yearning for domination obliged Zheng to scorn or condemn what he found. What was not admirable was at least worthy of curiosity. And from trip to trip, the imperial library in Beijing continued growing until it held four thousand books that collected the wisdom of the world. At the time, the king of Portugal had six books.

Believer, your life is too essential to waste on pettiness or word wars, greed or ladder climbing, anger or bitterness, fear or anxiety, regret or disappointment. Life is too short. We must run, not walk, the way of Isaiah 58, embracing authentic faith manifested through mercy and community. Living on mission requires nothing less. It is a grand adventure, a true voyage into the kingdom of God. Would you lose days, months, years pointing fingers and quarreling, or would you rather break yokes of oppression? Imagine what would happen if we all chose the latter.

merchants who financed this expedition viewed it as a reconnaissance mission rather than a trading venture and little cargo was loaded on board the ships. Instead, all available space was converted into living space for the large number of men on board, a necessary feature of long voyages into the unknown. Many would die on the outward trip and for those that survived there was a cornucopia of tropical diseases awaiting them on their arrival in the East

He looked like a being who'd voyaged back through time from a world that had overcome illness, pain, and conflict.

Self education is holy mission.

Great mission lies ahead of us.

Life is a pilgrimage of learning, a voyage of discovery, in which our mistaken views are corrected, our distorted notions adjusted, our shallow opinions deepened and some of our vast ignorances diminished.

Quantitative historians who use statistical tools to study big-picture historical trends, created a vast database of research on more than 36,000 slave ship voyages that took place over four hundred years. They found that there was a revolt on at least one in ten of these voyages. That was a much higher number than anyone expected. Revolts were never easy, but revolts on slave ships in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean were basically suicide missions. Nonetheless, many captives chose death over this exceptionally horrid new kind of slavery. This type of resistance was so expensive and time-consuming for the slavers, these historians estimate that it prevented at least a million more people from being captured and entering the slave trade. So why would a revolt happen on one ship and not another? The quantitative historians couldn't find a clear pattern, other than that captives tried to revolt whenever they would. But one thing did stand out: The more women onboard a slave ship, the more likely a revolt. Let me emphasize this point: the more women onboard a slave ship, the more likely a revolt would occur.

It is conventional wisdom now that anything built by the government will be a disaster. But the two "Voyager" spacecraft were built by the government (in partnership with that other bugaboo, academia). They came in at cost, on time, and vastly exceeded their design specifications--as well as the fondest dreams of their makers. Seeking not to control, threaten, wound, or destroy, these elegant machines represented the exploratory part of our nature set free to roam the Solar System and beyond. This kind of technology, the treasures it uncovers freely available to all humans everywhere, has been, over the last few decades, one of the few activities of the United States admired as much by those who abhor many of its policies as by those who agree with it on every issue. "Voyager" cost each American less than a penny a year from launch to Neptune encounter. Missions to the planets are one of those things--and I mean this not just for the United States, but for the human species--that we do best.

When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission—his life. ... Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book... was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded—Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer—everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book—it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things." But if this is what a book is... then a library is an extraordinary thing. ... The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that... all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ... The library, almost alone of the great monuments of civilization, stands taller now than it ever did before. The city... decays. The nation loses its grandeur... The university is not always certain what it is. But the library remains: a silent and enduring affirmation that the great Reports still speak, and not alone but somehow all together...

Make Believe When I wake up in the morning Not all is what it seems I drift through a world of make believe Between my real life and my dreams. Strange Adventures from the space book That I read the night before Crowd in upon on my drowsiness Through imagination's door. Between sleeping and waking The alarm clock's jangalang cry Becomes the roaring fire-railed rocket That hurls me through the sky. My bed's a silver spacecraft Which I pilot all alone Whisp'ring through endless stratospheres Towards planets still unknown. Outside through the mists of morning The spinning lights of cars In my make-believe space voyage Become eternities of stars. Is that my mother calling something That my dreams can't understand? Or can it be crackling instructions From far off Mission Command? Gareth Owen

The de Sudeley mission of 1178 had its roots in the turbulent years of the 1st century CE when Roman legions were advancing on Jerusalem and secret scrolls, maps and artifacts were hidden in the tunnels below the subterranean area of the Temple Mount. As I have recounted, in the early years of the 12th century, these items were found by early members of the Knights Templar. More than fifty years later, after much planning, de Sudeley completed a mission likely first envisioned by his Templar predecessors in Jerusalem. He left a detailed log compiled during the voyage, describing the year he spent in Onteora with the community that guarded the scrolls. He recorded geographic sites he had been to, Native Americans he met, and the community of Welsh and Norse he lived with in the Hunter Mountain area. His account was added to the existing record kept by the Templars at Castrum Sepulchri. Latin was the common language at this time, and the monk who recorded de Sudeley's deposition used it to write the record entitled, "A Year We Remember." This account was then added to the writings from the earlier 12th century Templar excavations in Jerusalem to comprise parts of the Templar Document.

Dad takes a step back, one hand still on my shoulder, and reaches into his pocket. He draws out a little blue capsule, and I feel every molecule in my body screaming to run. Dad must catch the panic in my eyes - he squeezes my shoulder and holds out the capsule. "Cas, it's fine. It's going to be fine. This is just in case." Just in case. Just in case the worst happens. The ship falls. Durga fails, I fail, and the knowledge I carry as a Reckoner trainer must be disposed of. That information can't fall into the wrong hands, into the hands of people who will do anything to take down our beasts. So this little capsule holds the pill that will kill me if it comes to that. "It's waterproof," Dad continues, pressing it into my hand. "The pocket on the collar of your wetsuit, keep it there. It has to stay with you at all times." It won't happen on this voyage. It's such a basic mission, gift-wrapped to be easy enough for me to handle on my own. But even holding the pill fills me with revulsion. On all my training voyages, I've never had to carry one of these capsules. That burden only goes to full-time trainers. "Cas." Dad tilts my chin up, ripping my gaze from the pull. "You were born to do this. I promise you, you'll forget you even have it." I suppose he ought to know - he's been carrying one for two decades. It's just a right of passage, I tell myself, and throw my arms around his neck once more.

But why would anyone—officer, seaman, or scientist—volunteer for such a risky and difficult mission in the Arctic?

Concern for the souls of the “savages” was part of the mission into Virginia. When this courageous band had been sent off from England, the Reverend Mr. William Crashaw reminded the colonists, “that the end of this voyage is the destruction of the devil’s kingdom, and the propagation of the Gospel.”19

In truth, Belmont’s Jockey Club, the organization that controlled Thoroughbred racing in America, was founded by a mix of people. Some were blue-blooded Americans who traced their ancestry to Mayflower voyagers and Puritan founding fathers, and others were nouveau riche industrialists who wished to ally themselves—through marriages to aristocrats, membership in the Episcopal Church, and associations with the elite sport of horse racing—to the American upper crust. At

Future destinations in our solar system neighborhood include potential probe missions to a few moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune -- mainly by virtue of them being possible candidates for life, with their large oceans buried beneath icy crusts, plus intense volcanic activity. But getting humans to explore these possibly habitable worlds is a big issue in space travel. The record for the fastest-ever human spaceflight was set by the Apollo 10 crew as they gravita­tionally slingshotted around the Moon on their way back to Earth in May 1969. They hit a top speed of 39,897 kilo­meters per hour (24,791 miles per hour); at that speed you could make it from New York to Sydney and back in under one hour. Although that sounds fast, we've since recorded un-crewed space probes reaching much higher speeds, with the crown currently held by NASA's Juno probe, which, when it entered orbit around Jupiter, was traveling at 266,000 kilometers per hour (165,000 miles per hour). To put this into perspective, it took the Apollo 10 mission four days to reach the Moon; Opportunity took eight months to get to Mars; and Juno took five years to reach Jupiter. The distances in our solar system with our current spaceflight technology make planning for long-term crewed explora­tion missions extremely difficult." "So, will we ever explore beyond the edge of the solar system itself? The NASA Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched back in 1977 with extended flyby missions to the outer gas giant planets of Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 even had flyby encounters with Uranus and Neptune -- it's the only probe ever to have visited these two planets. "The detailed images you see of Uranus and Neptune were all taken by Voyager 2. Its final flyby of Neptune was in October 1989, and since then, it has been traveling ever farther from the Sun, to the far reaches of the solar sys­tem, communicating the properties of the space around it with Earth the entire time. In February 2019, Voyager 2 reported a massive drop off in the number of solar wind particles it was detecting and a huge jump in cosmic ray particles from outer space. At that point, it had finally left the solar system, forty-one years and five months after being launched from Earth. "Voyager 1 was the first craft to leave the solar system in August 2012, and it is now the most distant synthetic object from Earth at roughly 21.5 billion kilometers (13.5 billion miles) away. Voyager 2 is ever so slightly closer to us at 18 billion kilometers (11 billion miles) away. Although we may ultimately lose contact with the Voyager probes, they will continue to move ever farther away from the Sun with nothing to slow them down or impede them. For this reason, both Voyager crafts carry a recording of sounds from Earth, including greetings in fifty-five differ­ent languages, music styles from around the world, and sounds from nature -- just in case intelligent life forms happen upon the probes in the far distant future when the future of humanity is unknown.

my experience began to match my theories, and the two came together to create a reasonably successful vision for conducting the principal mission of our ship. It was a small victory in a small universe, but a powerful lesson for me that our visions need both theory and experience to be valid.

Israël est l’essence de la spiritualité proprement judaïque et le patriarche éponyme du peuple juif. Étymologiquement, ce Nom est lié à une idée de puissance et de victoire, car il signifie : ≪ que Dieu règne ! Qu’Il se montre fort ! ≫. Et c’est ce Nom sacré qui va être porte par un Etat moderne, subversif dans sa constitution même puisqu’il prétend mettre fin par des moyens profanes a une sanction divine ! Il faut toute l’indifférence et l’inconscience du monde occidentale pour ne pas réaliser l’énormité d’une telle usurpation. Imagine-t-on une ≪ République d’Allah ≫, un ≪ Royaume du Christ-Roi ≫ ou ≪ du Voyage Nocturne ≫ s’installant en Palestine ? En l’occurrence, l’acte profanateur est d’autant plus dangereux qu’il comporte une astuce tactique. La préoccupation majeure d’un Etat illégitime, pour ne pas dire sa hantise, est naturellement d’être reconnu. Or, dans le cas présent cette reconnaissance ne porte pas seulement sur l’existence de cet Etat, mais aussi sur le droit à porter le nom qu’il s’est attribué. Reconnaître l’ ≪ Etat d’Israël ≫ implique que l’on valide la profanation dont il s’est rendu coupable, que l’on devienne son complice, et surtout qu’on le déclare, à tort, favorisé par une bénédiction divine et investi de la charge d’instaurer le règne de Dieu et d’assurer Sa puissance. Combattre un tel Etat, c’est le renforcer ; le reconnaître, c’est le renforcer davantage : tel est le dilemme infernal. Pour tout esprit traditionnel, la seule attitude légitime, fondée à la fois sur la vérité et le droit, est de refuser cette reconnaissance, quel que soit le prix à payer pour ce déni. Le premier devoir d’un juif orthodoxe, d’un chrétien ou d’un musulman est de ne pas reconnaître l’Etat juif. Ceci dit, il va de soi que la duplicité et la faiblesse des hommes n’ont pas le pouvoir de modifier le Droit divin ou de le rendre caduc. En vertu de sa mission propre et grâce à sa position cyclique, l’islam est mieux à même que toute autre religion de veiller au respect de ce Droit et au maintien de l’orthodoxie traditionnelle. On peut tenir pour assuré qu’il n’acceptera jamais le fais accompli.

When Derek Sivers first built his business CDbaby.com, he set up a standard confirmation email to let customers know their order had been shipped. After a few months, Derek felt that this email wasn’t aligned with his mission—to make people smile. So he sat down and wrote a better one. Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed on a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy. We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, June 6th. I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!! —Derek Sivers, Anything You Want The result wasn’t just delighted customers. That one email brought thousands of new customers to CD Baby. The people who got it couldn’t help sharing it with their friends. Try Googling “private CD Baby jet”; you’ll find over 900,000 search results to date. Derek’s email has been cited by business blogs the world over as an example of how to authentically put your words to work for your business.

You must be fully awake in the divine journey.

Explore your unique talent.

While human spaceflight is certainly compelling – and it has always been a big part of my reporting career -- there is something about unmanned robotic spacecraft that has always tugged at my heart. These machines are our emissaries out into the cosmos, flung to faraway places that humans can’t yet visit. I grew up hearing about spacecraft like Mariner, Viking and Voyager boldly going on some of the first-ever deep space missions and making monumental discoveries that changed our view of the Solar System. They showed us worlds we previously could only dream about and artists could only imagine.

SPACE... it's fucking big. These are the voyages of the starship, A.S.F. Willful Child. Its ongoing mission: to seek out strange new worlds on which to plant the Terran flag, to subjugate and if necessary obliterate new life life-forms, to boldly blow the...

Flying saucers aside, a visceral childhood fascination with what’s out there, launched by pop culture and propelled by real-life space missions during NASA’s heyday, is a recurring narrative among SETI researchers. “I’m a child of the Apollo era,” said Mark Showalter, a Sagan Center senior research scientist. “I’m in this room today because of Neil Armstrong. Watching the moonwalk — that was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen in my life.” To date, Showalter has discovered, or co-discovered, six moons in the solar system: Pan (orbiting Saturn); Mab and Cupid (Uranus); Kerberos and Styx (Pluto); and just last year, a Neptune moon, still unnamed. “We could be sending missions to all kinds of fantastic destinations and learning things for decades to come,” he said. But the scheduled NASA voyages to the outer planets appear nearly done.  The New Horizons spacecraft flies by Pluto next year; the probes to Jupiter and Saturn shut down in 2017. Even the much-heralded Clipper mission — the proposed robotic expedition to Europa — isn’t yet a go. So far, with a projected $2 billion cost, only $170 million has been appropriated. At 56, Showalter concedes that his professional career will conclude with these final journeys. “It takes twenty years from the time you start thinking about the project to the time you actually get to the outer planets,” he said. And without new missions, he worries, and wonders, about the new generation. “It’s the missions that capture imaginations. If those aren’t happening, kids might not go into science the way my generation did.

You did a fine job with those science nerds over the course of this past year, John. Very fine job. Nothing but praise from the lot of them. Well done.” His thick English accent had a soothing effect every time he spoke. John remembered him fondly as a young man. His father and the Admiral had gone to the academy together and served side by side for many years before John’s father met an untimely death. Sitting here with him now and listening to him speak brought him back to those simpler times. “I was just doing my duty, Sir.” “Oh come now. You know and I know that there isn’t a bloody captain in this entire fleet that wanted that assignment. There isn’t a bit of action when you have the lot of them aboard. And on a bloody science mission besides. No, no, you are a real hero for saving all of us from having to do such a duty. And for a year! Bloody hell.” He opened up a drawer and pulled out two thick, stubby glasses, and then extracted a bottle of rum. Of course he brought out the rum. “I suppose you heard that we’ve been hard at work getting our first Deep Space Class starship ready to launch this year?” he asked as he filled both glasses half full with the amber liquid. He Offered one glass to John who took it with reluctance. He had never been one who liked liquor. “Heard she’s a beauty. The engine is something of a marvel as well?” “Damn straight,” he said as he downed his first glass in one pull. He filled his glass up half full for round two. “Currently our fastest ship will get you to the Wild Space region in twenty years. This buggers going to do it in six months and I’d like you to take her out on her maiden voyage.” John sat back in shock. The thought of taking out the prototype of the future… it was a great honor and one that hundreds of captains in star fleet would give anything for. He certainly wasn’t worthy of such an honor. He didn’t have nearly the amount of years as everyone else in the fleet. “I don’t think it’d be right to accept, would it? I mean… there are some captains who’ve…” “Bumshnickles!” he shouted. “Your father was the captain of the first Earth Starship Independence. It’s only right that the second to bear her name should have an Avery in the chair.

Stone went through two more corrections, and five sharp braking maneuvers. Then, maybe half a mile from the booster, he took the Apollo on a short, angular inspection sweep. The reaction control systems bit sharply, rattling York against her restraint. York watched the cluster roll with silent grace past her window. The booster cluster was squat, pregnant with fuel. Its heart was a fat MS-II booster, a Saturn second stage, modified to serve as an orbital injector. Fixed to the front of the MS-II was an MS-IVB, a modified Saturn third stage, a narrower cylinder. To either side of the MS-II were fixed the two External Tanks, fat, silvery cylinders as long and as wide as the MS-II stage itself. The supplementary tanks carried more than two million pounds of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, propellant Ares would need to break clear of Earth orbit. The MS-II and its tanks looked like three fat sausages, side by side, with the slimmer pencil shape of the MS-IVB protruding from the center. The rest of the Ares stack—the Mission Module, MEM, and Apollo—would be docked onto the front of the MS-IVB to complete the assembly of the first Mars ship, a needle well over three hundred feet long.

Once they got into the Mission Module, the standard of cuisine would improve, York knew. But while they were stuck inside the Apollo they had to make do with squirting water into color-coded plastic bags of dehydrated food. Still, she wasn’t about to complain. The Command Module was like a cute little mobile home, with its warm water for food and coffee, and toothpaste, even a system for the guys to shave. Gershon came floating up with a handful of gold-painted bags. “Hey. I found these at the front. None of us is coded gold, are we?” Stone smiled. “Nope. I had those put there for you to find.” York studied the bags. “Beef and potatoes. Butterscotch pudding. Brownies. Grape punch.” She looked at Stone. “What’s this? None of this was in my personal preference. In fact, I hate butterscotch pudding.” “I thought it was kind of appropriate. This was the first meal the Apollo 11 crew ate in space. Straight after translunar injection, after they left Earth orbit for the Moon.” “All right,” Ralph Gershon said, and he pulled a hose out of the potable water tank and squirted the spigot into his bags with enthusiasm. York looked at the bags again. Butterscotch pudding, in memoriam. Bizarre. But maybe, after all, it was appropriate.

In many cases, developing the ability to operate autonomously while remaining within the intent of one’s mission is an important part of a leader’s developmental process—and one that today’s leaders may have to develop on their own initiative.

The sea was beautifully calm after we passed through the Strait of Bonifacio between Corsica and Sardinia, just south of it. Bitts had said, “You’ll notice the difference when Corsica gets between us and the prevailing westerly winds.” And I certainly did. We were now in Italian waters and I believe that was the first time I had ever seen anything Italian calm.

was in the winter of 1835–6 that the ship Alert, in the prosecution of her voyage for hides on the remote and almost unknown coast of California, floated into the vast solitude of the Bay of San Francisco. All around was the stillness of nature. One vessel, a Russian, lay at anchor there, but during our whole stay not a sail came or went. Our trade was with remote Missions, which sent hides to us in launches manned by their Indians.

The Arizona spent the ensuing years of World War I deployed along the Atlantic coast, mostly on training missions. After the Armistice in November 1918, Arizona crossed the Atlantic to England and then joined the flotilla of warships escorting President Woodrow Wilson to peace talks in France. A second Atlantic voyage to France and across the Mediterranean followed. By 1921, Arizona had made its first transit of the Panama Canal and first crossing of the equator, and came to be home-ported in San Pedro, California, not yet engulfed by greater Los Angeles. High morale and esprit de corps are essential components in any military command, but particularly so aboard ships at sea. BB-39’s can-do motto quickly became “At ’em Arizona” and a newsletter with that name—at first crudely typed but increasingly polished as the years went by—was, as its masthead proudly proclaimed, “Published daily aboard the U.S.S. Arizona wherever she may be.”6

China’s Ming Dynasty had its own version of the Age of Exploration but abandoned it. Starting in the early 1400s, Ming Dynasty Emperor Yongle empowered his most trusted admiral, Zheng He, to lead seven major naval expeditions—“treasure voyages”—around the world. Though not colonizing expeditions (and historians debate the extent to which they were commercial), these naval missions helped project China’s power abroad. Yongle’s navy was the largest and most sophisticated in the world, featuring larger and better-constructed ships than any country in Europe would produce for at least a century.

But when the character traits of innovation and creativity collide with established ideas, it doesn’t always work out well. A few years after Deep Blue, I was selected to a fourth star and headed to US Southern Command with a particular vision for the command that had evolved from a series of conversations I had had with then secretary of defense Don Rumsfeld and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Both felt that the old paradigm for a combatant command—a massive, cumbersome organization organized strictly to conduct combat operations—was lacking in relevance in the twenty-first century. Both believed that for both Latin America and Africa, it was highly unlikely that we would be engaged in state-on-state combat operations. So the idea was to push the two combatant commands responsible for those regions to try to adapt with a vision that included combat readiness but with a very heavy dose of “soft power” capability—humanitarian operations, medical diplomacy, rule of law, personnel exchanges, counternarcotics, strategic communications, interagency cooperation, and so forth. Given this mandate, I plunged in with enthusiasm—perhaps too much enthusiasm. I underestimated the strong desire of many within the massive command to continue on its current, traditional war-fighting trajectory. When I completely reorganized the staff, getting rid of the Napoleonic traditional military staff system, it created real confusion and resentment. While most of the team went along, cooperation was grudging and halfhearted in many cases. While I continue to believe we had outlined the right mission for the command, I pushed too hard, creating antibodies, and the project crumbled after my departure—effectively negating three years of demanding work. The lesson I took away is that innovation matters deeply, but even if you have the right answer, you must be capable of bringing along the nonbelievers.

sir?’ ‘The ship’s captain on such occasions will be in bed with a high fever and will be asleep.’ It might have been a better idea, Magnusson thought, to have made him the ship’s captain, but he supposed a naval ship had to have a naval captain. ‘I see, sir,’ he said. The admiral gestured. ‘A great deal will depend on you, my lad,’ he said briskly. ‘Which is why you’re being done the honour of a personal briefing, something not normally granted to a junior officer. At the right time a sighting will be reported, showing you to be in mid-Atlantic, and inevitably the Germans will pick it up. Another sighting will be arranged later to show you off the Faeroes. In fact, you will sail up the Irish Sea, through the Minches, and, keeping well out from land to avoid being spotted, you will make your landfall west of the Lofotens and put into Narvik. There, you will be informed of what’s going on by our contact, a woman called Annie Egge, who runs the Norwegian equivalent of our Missions to Seamen. She will give you – you, Magnusson, because as the linguist, she’ll be dealing with you – she will give you your information. I don’t know what she’s like – like most middle-aged ladies who run Missions to Seamen, I suppose – all God and woollen comforts – but she has been feeding us reliable information for some time about German shipping, gleaned no doubt over the cups of tea and the meat and potato pie or whatever it is they serve up in Norway. Since, in the event of a German move into Norway, we shall need to know a few facts, you will keep your eyes open and take note of all Norwegian naval vessels, fortifications and movements, and all army and air force installations. You will remain there for several days under the guise of Finnish sailors making repairs after the voyage across the North Atlantic to enable you to reach Mariehamn.

serait utile pour le voyage, et comme un souvenir pour les survivants ; plus utile encore pour les revenants, ceux qui, n’étant pas plus morts que les autres, sont allés suffisamment loin ailleurs pour n’être plus tout à fait de retour ici, dans le monde où chacun continue de vaquer à ses occupations comme si la répétition des jours et des gestes avait un sens linéaire, établi, comme si ce théâtre était une mission. Les revenants liraient leurs notes, regarderaient vivre les autres, frotteraient leurs souvenirs et leurs vies. Ils compareraient le tout

Somewhere on the rocky voyage from the garage to the fully managed organization, they get it backward. They begin to view the passion as something they can use to build the business. That may well be true, of course. The problem is, if you keep heading in that direction, you’ll eventually lose whatever it was that gave the company its mojo in the early days. Contributing something great and unique to the world will become less and less of a priority. By the time the second or third generation of owners takes over, there’s a good chance that the passion and the business will have gone their separate ways, and the company will have become just another income-producing property. If it’s acquired, it won’t be because the acquirer’s stockholders share the passion or believe in the mission (whatever the new management may say). They’ll want to own it only if they think it will improve their financial returns. People will work there mainly because they need a job. Customers will buy its products and services only if they offer the best value for the money. The company will be an economic mechanism and little more. Pretty much everything else will have been lost.

Fundamentals of Esperanto The grammatical rules of this language can be learned in one sitting. Nouns have no gender & end in -o; the plural terminates in -oj & the accusative, -on Amiko, friend; amikoj, friends; amikon & amikojn, accusative friend & friends. Ma amiko is my friend. A new book appears in Esperanto every week. Radio stations in Europe, the United States, China, Russia & Brazil broadcast in Esperanto, as does Vatican Radio. In 1959, UNESCO declared the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers to be in accord with its mission & granted this body consultative status. The youth branch of the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers, UTA, has offices in 80 different countries & organizes social events where young people curious about the movement may dance to recordings by Esperanto artists, enjoy complimentary soft drinks & take home Esperanto versions of major literary works including the Old Testament & A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shatner’s first feature-length vehicle was a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto. Esperanto is among the languages currently sailing into deep space on board the Voyager spacecraft. - Esperanto is an artificial language constructed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, a polish oculist. following a somewhat difficult period in my life. It was twilight & snowing on the railway platform just outside Warsaw where I had missed my connection. A man in a crumpled track suit & dark glasses pushed a cart piled high with ripped & weathered volumes— sex manuals, detective stories, yellowing musical scores & outdated physics textbooks, old copies of Life, new smut, an atlas translated, a grammar, The Mirror, Soviet-bloc comics, a guide to the rivers & mountains, thesauri, inscrutable musical scores & mimeographed physics books, defective stories, obsolete sex manuals— one of which caught my notice (Dr. Esperanto since I had time, I traded my used Leaves of Grass for a copy. I’m afraid I will never be lonely enough. There’s a man from Quebec in my head, a friend to the purple martins. Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows. All purple martins are dying or dead. Brainscans of grown purple martins suggest these creatures feel the same levels of doubt & bliss as an eight-year-old girl in captivity. While driving home from the brewery one night this man from Quebec heard a radio program about purple martins & the next day he set out to build them a house in his own back yard. I’ve never built anything, let alone a house, not to mention a home for somebody else. Never put in aluminum floors to smooth over the waiting. Never piped sugar water through colored tubes to each empty nest lined with newspaper shredded with strong, tired hands. Never dismantled the entire affair & put it back together again. Still no swallows. I never installed the big light that stays on through the night to keep owls away. Never installed lesser lights, never rested on Sunday with a beer on the deck surveying what I had done & what yet remained to be done, listening to Styx while the neighbor kids ran through my sprinklers. I have never collapsed in abandon. Never prayed. But enough about the purple martins. Every line of the work is a first & a last line & this is the spring of its action. Of course, there’s a journey & inside that journey, an implicit voyage through the underworld. There’s a bridge made of boats; a carp stuffed with flowers; a comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors; a digression on shadows; That’s how we finally learn who the hero was all along. Weary & old, he sits on a rock & watches his friends fly by one by one out of the song, then turns back to the journey they all began long ago, keeping the river to his right.

No doubt, there was something that drew people to this particular launch—a sense of something epochal, a passing of the torch from Voyager to a new generation of explorers who had been inspired by Voyager. You could feel it; it was in the air, now it was a new generation’s chance to explore never-before-seen worlds.

The ubiquity of New Horizons and Pluto on the web, and the number of people sharing in New Horizons events around the globe, gave this flyby an entirely new kind of feel. The world had changed since Voyager, with so many new forms of communication and participation. Thanks to that, the New Horizons mission felt in many ways like the first truly twenty-first-century planetary encounter. Consider: with Voyager, to participate fully you had to be in just the right place—specifically, at JPL—at just the right time—on flyby day. For New Horizons you didn’t need to be there; the flyby was everywhere simultaneously. The events at APL, the imagery from Pluto—everything that reached Earth—went onto the internet “for all mankind,” as it were.

History is to record us,” he warned his colleagues at the time. “Is it to record that when the destruction of the Union was imminent … we stood quarreling?

Columbus’s fateful voyage was inspired by his study of a map by Paolo Toscanelli. But there was also the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, which killed hundreds of people until a physician, John Snow, drew a map demonstrating that a single contaminated water pump was the source of the illness, thereby founding the science of epidemiology. There was the 1944 invasion at Normandy, which succeeded only because of the unheralded contribution of mapmakers who had stolen across the English Channel by night for months before D-Day and mapped the French beaches.* Even the moon landing was a product of mapping. In 1961, the United States Geological Survey founded a Branch of Astrogeology, which spent a decade painstakingly assembling moon maps to plan the Apollo missions. The Apollo 11 crew pored over pouches of those maps as their capsule approached the lunar surface, much as Columbus did during his voyage. It seems that the greatest achievements in human history have all been made possible by the science of cartography.

This book is a story of encounters between Reef peoples and places, ideas, and environments, over more than two centuries, beginning with James Cook’s bewildered voyage through a coral maze and ending with the searing mission of reef scientist John “Charlie” Veron to goad us to act over the impending death of the Reef.

First, the K-129 missed sending a routine, but expected, message to fleet headquarters that it had safely crossed the International Date Line on March 1. Then, on March 4, the eleventh day of the voyage, K-129 trespassed outside the boundary of its normal mission box and proceeded on a dangerous course that would take it closer to enemy waters than a normal assignment allowed. Finally, on March 7, a more ominous harbinger of trouble came with the submarine’s failure to transmit the mandatory message to headquarters that it was on regular station and prepared to carry out its patrol.