Category: A Victory!
At least he has the right rifle for the job! (Win. Model 70)
I once harbored personal aspirations concerning the astronaut program myself. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed. NASA photo.
Human beings are social creatures. We are designed by our Creator to crave the company of fellow humans. To be deprived of this mystical stuff is invariably deleterious to the normal psyche.
Our drive for companionship falls along a spectrum. Some folks cannot maintain their sanity if they aren’t among a crowd. Others are happiest with a good book and solitude…for a time. However, true social isolation will, legit, drive a guy crazy.
You can see this in prisons. Even if your mates are all hardened maniacal criminals, everybody despises solitary confinement. A little solitude can be cathartic. A lot is invariably hellish.
Next Level Stuff
Unless you are ridiculously wealthy, you probably will not get to ride into space. Astronaut selection is unimaginably arduous. Curiously, I once aspired to that myself. I applied for the astronaut program right out of flight school and got closer than I had expected.
Had I not cashed in my flight suit in favor of being a husband and father, I might have actually pulled that off eventually. Or not. That’s one of life’s many imponderables.
In retrospect, everything worked out fine. There is arguably no more high-effort/high-payoff profession than serving as an astronaut. However, that’s a pretty tough life.
It’s one thing if you find yourself stuck at Walmart for an hour or even snowbound for a few days. It’s something else entirely to be trapped in space. That experience just touches a primal chord. So much so that more than a few top-flight movies have been made on the very subject. However, sometimes it actually happens for real.
Mankind has maintained a constant presence in space for decades now. Life in the limitless void brings its own unique challenges. NASA photo.
Recent Examples
Astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunny Williams launched up to the International Space Station aboard the new Boeing Starliner back in June of 2024 on what was supposed to be an eight-day mission. Then everything about the Starliner went pear-shaped, and they had to bring the ship back empty. Finally, some 286 days later, a SpaceX Dragon capsule fetched them home. Wilmore and Williams seemed fairly introspective about the experience.
Throughout their time in orbit, Wilmore and Williams were stranded but not forgotten. They could rest easy knowing that the economic and engineering juggernaut that is the United States of Freaking America was going to eventually bring them home. But what if that was not the case?
The Castaway
Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev was born in Leningrad in 1958. His hobbies included skiing, cycling, swimming, aerobatic flying, and amateur radio. He studied Mechanical Engineering and joined NPO Energa in 1981. This was the agency responsible for manned spaceflight in the old Soviet Union.
Over the next several years, he paid his dues. Krikalev played a significant support role in docking with and repairing the out-of-control Salyut 7 space station in 1985. Then, on 26 November 1988, he headed up to the Mir space station for a protracted stay alongside another Russian cosmonaut and a French counterpart. He safely returned to Earth in April of the following year.
Cosmonauts don’t just fall off the turnip truck, and the Soviets wanted to get their money’s worth. On 19 May 1991, Krikalev launched for Mir yet again, this time with a fellow Russian and Brit named Helen Sharman. Sharman came home after a week.
Krikalev and his counterpart, Anatoly Artsebarsky, stuck around per the original mission parameters. When Artsebarsky rotated home, Krikalev volunteered to remain in orbit as Mir’s flight engineer. Then, on 26 December 1991, the Soviet Union imploded under its own weight. The nation that had fired Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev into space no longer existed. He was stuck.
Like most things, a little bit of space is probably pretty cool. Too much, however, is another thing entirely. NASA photo.
When Life Gives You Lemons, Flirt with a Girl…
Krikalev made the best of things. He did scads of EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity- aka space walks) and spoke to folks all around the globe via ham radio. One of his radio buddies was Margaret Iaquinto.
Sergei and Margaret spoke daily for more than a year total. They discussed personal issues, politics, and technical stuff. Iaquinto established a digital bulletin board that the Mir crew could use to get unfiltered news about the death of the Soviet Union.
The Baikonur Cosmodrome and the mission landing area were both located in newly independent Kazakhstan. Folks on the ground seemed a bit preoccupied with their own problems to fret about one dude who had already been in space for a long, long time.
After a great deal of chaos, Krikalev finally came home on 25 March. Because of his unique circumstances, he has been rightfully described as the last citizen of the Soviet Union.
The Rest of the Story
That guy just couldn’t get enough. Once the dust settled on the USSR, Sergei Krikalev volunteered to fly on the US space shuttle. On 3 February 1994, Krikalev blasted off yet again, this time as a crewmember on shuttle flight STS-60.
He returned to Earth aboard the space shuttle Discovery eight days later. In December of 1998, he returned to space as part of STS-88 aboard Endeavor to assist in the assembly of the International Space Station. He returned to the station two more times after that.
Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev went to space a total of six times. He spent an aggregate of 803 days, 9 hours, and 39 minutes in orbit. He conducted eight EVAs for a total of 41 hours and 8 minutes floating about in the void. He is number four on the list of space travelers based on total time spent off-planet. The other three are also all cosmonauts.
Thanks to the curious phenomenon of time dilation, Krikalev is 0.02 seconds younger than someone else born at exactly the same time who remained on Earth. He was awarded both the Hero of Russia and the Hero of the Soviet Union for his extensive work in the heavens. Krikalev closed out his extraordinary career in command of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center.
Not half bad for a guy who was shipwrecked in space when his country fell to pieces.
Categories
M1 Garand by CMP
A legally armed citizen killed a teen gunman in anti-gun downtown Seattle. It may be an awkward situation for city leaders. iStock-1354934183When a legally armed citizen intervened in a shooting in downtown Seattle, killing the suspect who had just wounded two victims, there was not a sound heard from the billionaire-backed gun prohibition lobby headquartered in the city, nor the anti-gun mayor.
It’s a rather awkward situation for Mayor Bruce Harrell and his gun ban allies, who would have the world believe guns are only bad, and gun owners are worse.
The unidentified armed bystander remained at the scene and cooperated with police. Investigators recovered the suspect’s gun, which he was carrying illegally because he was only 16, and the Samaritan was not arrested. What’s so special about this incident?
A string of far-left Seattle mayors and state legislators have been trying for years to make it difficult, if not impossible, for law-abiding citizens to carry guns in the Jet City. The city was successfully sued by the Second Amendment Foundation and National Rifle Association in 2012 after trying to ban guns in city park facilities, in direct violation of the state’s long-standing preemption law.
Subsequent attempts by the city to repeal state preemption have been rejected by the Democrat-controlled legislature.
The incident was put in perspective by Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, who observed, “In a city where political policies have resulted in reduced police manpower while placing limits on the officers who remain, it should come as no surprise that an increasing number of law-abiding citizens are now licensed to carry firearms for their personal protection. Seattle and King County have the highest number of active licenses of any county in the state. Coincidentally, just a few blocks away at about the same time, there was a fatal stabbing, which says a lot about crime in the city.”
An online poll by KOMO News, the local ABC affiliate, showed that an overwhelming 70 percent of respondents say their feeling of safety when working or visiting downtown Seattle is low.
Preliminary indications so far suggest the armed citizen’s intervention looked like a “clean shoot.” Here are the reasons for taking that perspective:
State court rulings have made it clear there is no duty to retreat in Washington state.
The Evergreen State has—despite passage of draconian gun control laws in recent years—solid statutes covering the use of force.
Under RCW 9A.16.020, force is lawful “Whenever necessarily used by a person arresting one who has committed a felony and delivering him or her to a public officer competent to receive him or her into custody;
“Whenever used by a party about to be injured, or by another lawfully aiding him or her, in preventing or attempting to prevent an offense against his or her person, or a malicious trespass, or other malicious interference with real or personal property lawfully in his or her possession, in case the force is not more than is necessary…”
Then there is RCW 9A.16.050, which covers homicide by a private citizen. This statute explains, “Homicide is also justifiable when committed either:
“(1) In the lawful defense of the slayer, or his or her husband, wife, parent, child, brother, or sister, or of any other person in his or her presence or company, when there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design on the part of the person slain to commit a felony or to do some great personal injury to the slayer or to any such person, and there is imminent danger of such design being accomplished; or
“(2) In the actual resistance of an attempt to commit a felony upon the slayer, in his or her presence, or upon or in a dwelling, or other place of abode, in which he or she is.”
Perhaps also by no surprise, coverage of the incident by the traditionally liberal and anti-gun Seattle Times quickly disappeared from the newspaper’s website, but not before it correctly acknowledged the suspect was stopped by a legally armed citizen.
According to the state Department of Licensing, King County, which encompasses Seattle, has the highest number of active concealed pistol licenses of any county in the state, more than 112,000 at the end of April. There are 705,000 active CPLs statewide, which translates to about 1 in every 9 eligible adults in the state being licensed to carry.
Former King County Sheriff John Urquhart told KING5 News, the local NBC affiliate, that the ultimate decision whether the armed citizen acted within the parameters of state law will come from the county prosecutor’s office. The former sheriff now acts as a law enforcement analyst for the station.
However, Urquhart observed, “The fact that the citizen was not arrested, was not booked, is not being described as a suspect, leads me to believe Seattle police see this as a legal and justified use of force.”
All of this may put Mayor Harrell in the uncomfortable position of having to acknowledge a legally armed bystander stopped an illegally armed would-be killer from causing further mayhem. That is, if he says anything at all. Harrell is known for dodging issues which may put him in an unfavorable position with his hard-left Seattle constituents, and it is an election year
Imagine the recoil and you have the reason why I WILL NOT shoot one. Grumpy
