A very slow news day

It's really a very slow news day with nothing particular visibly going on any of sites I typically scan for news. 

In the sorta-news out there, Blue Origin is starting operations of a new ground network called Quartz, reminiscent of NASA's first "deep sky network" - three ground stations spread more or less equally around the globe to receive downlinks from different satellites. More satellites are in the plans. 

Phase one of the Quartz ground stations feature 3.7-meter aperture antennas supporting S-band and X-band frequencies for low Earth orbit (LEO) operations. Blue Origin's Global Network Operations Center provides continuous oversight and incident response across all sites, resulting in a ground communications architecture with no third-party dependencies. Quartz was designed with security in mind and supports radiometric tracking, signal intelligence, and Space Domain Awareness capabilities across all sites.

For those unfamiliar with satellite communications, 3.7 meters (12' 1.6") isn't even remotely big for antennas used for satellite downlinks. 3.7 meters is about the size of the old Satellite TV antennas we had in the early 1980s. Back when they were much bigger than the little dishes we see now. On the other end of the scale, the big dishes of NASA's Deep Sky Network (DSN), used to listen to the Voyager satellites out in interstellar space are 70 meters (240 feet) in diameter. Which is not to compare the jobs they're designed for, just to show that they're like everyday size dishes as opposed to really big dishes. 

An interesting people-related story is on the retirement of Michael Fincke, a NASA astronaut for 30 years. We know him from the Starliner fiasco in the second half of '24. He got delayed from a trip to the ISS due to shuffling crew and ships to fly to the ISS on the Crew-11 mission with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Kimiya Yui, NASA astronaut Zena Cardman and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov on Aug. 1, 2025. That mission was ended earlier than intended when Fincke had a medical emergency. What's interesting in that article is that it contains two videos that total an hour of watching time, and those two videos are said to describe just how "eff-ed up" that Starliner mission was. And, no, I haven't watched those two videos - yet. 

Really, those are the only two moderately interesting stories I've come across today. 

Around "Castle Graybeard" things are pretty much as usual except for yesterday. As I've commented many other times over the years, if there's a movie we want to see, we tend to go to a weekday morning or midday matinee, and yesterday we went to see "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" primarily based on hearing it was doing exceptionally well in theaters, and secondarily because we've seen all of the other Spider-Man movies with this group: Tom Holland as Spidey, Zendaya as MJ and Jacob Batalan as their friend Ned. I'm happy to add they've all gotten better onscreen personas as they've grown. 

I have vague memories of reading the early '70s Spider-Man comics, but I'm sure we started watching the modern Marvel Universe version first trilogy with Tobey Maguire as Spidey, and the next trilogy with Andrew Garfield. When Tom Holland popped up in the last trilogy, I'd never heard of him, but thought he came across well. Since then, I've seen him in other movies and thought he did well in all of them. I think I've read that in almost all the spider-man movies, the guy playing Spidey and the girl playing MJ ended up in some sort of off-screen relationship for a while. I think Holland and Zendaya are the only two who actually got married in real life. I ran across something yesterday that gave me the impression they're both 30. Someone somewhere (Tyrus on "Gutfeld!" I think) conditioned me to react to this by saying they're both grown-ass adults so good luck to both of them. 

I know many readers are anxiously waiting for my review, although most readers have shut down the blog and are reading somewhere else, so let me tell you that I'll give it an 8 out of 10. I think there's a lot going on in the movie and I just got the feeling we're being clued in to a lot of movies yet to come. For example, one of the characters in this movie is named Jean Gray (played by Sadie Sink - whom I've never heard of), and she was a character in the X-Men movies. Is that a lead-in to another X-Men series? Or crossover between the X-Men and other Marvel movies? You know everything I know. 

NASA’s Crew-11 mission members stand inside the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Nov. 13, 2024. From left are Mission Specialist Kimiya Yui from JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), Commander NASA astronaut Zena Cardman, Mission Specialist Oleg Platonov of Roscosmos, and Pilot NASA astronaut Mike Fincke. Image: NASA/Josh Valcarcel