Enhance Rather Than Recycle

Conditions: Surprisingly cold

Conservation A little bit of common sense crept into the offices of Nasa this week as they announced that the giant space station in orbit above us won’t be pushed into a fiery death in 2020.

Instead of splashing into the Pacific Ocean in 2020 as planned, the International Space Station will continue circling Earth for at least an additional four years, NASA announced on Wednesday.
[...]



Last year, NASA studied the station and concluded that it could last until 2028. The other space agencies participating in it, including the European Space Agency and those of Russia and Japan, have not decided whether they, too, will continue beyond 2020.

“In general, they’re all pretty supportive,” Mr. Gerstenmaier said, adding that if necessary, NASA would go it alone.

- nytimes.com

The station was only built recently, at absolutely huge expense, and because scientists insisted that they really really needed it. What surprises me is that there’s any plan at all to destroy it. Why get rid of it? Is it in someone’s way? It seems enormously wasteful to me to assemble this thing in orbit and then get rid of it a few short decades later. If we are to travel to other planets, we need to stop getting rid of the vehicles that could take us there.



Film Review: Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

The latest entry in the Bourne-style spy action films franchise, Shadow Recruit is also a reboot of the Jack Ryan films, so it’s two familiar things wrapped into one. Added to that is that it’s essentially the same film as The Peacemaker, where people work together to uncover and then stop a desperate and sneaky plan to blow up New York, so it’s then three familiar things wrapped up into one. Kevin Costner pops up as a CIA mentor to new recruit Jack Ryan (Chris Pine), who is initially inspired by 9/11 to serve his country in Afghanistan. One helicopter crash and a long period of recovery with girlfriend Kiera Knightley later, he’s then working undercover as a banking analyst. He notices issues with a Russian companies finances and he charges off to Moscow to snoop around. He’s in fact stumbled onto a plot to destroy the American economy by blowing up Wall Street.

It seems a little thin to me, but Russian bad guy Kenneth Branagh is fully committed to it, so who knows. It’s not the major problem, the major problem here is the contrast of the light and breezy nature of the film that is full of very serious people trying to do serious things. And yet despite all this seriousness the key scene revolves around dinner in a restaurant where Chris Pine has to pretend he’s a drunken asshole so that Branagh will tell him to go away and leave him alone with Kiera, giving Chris the opportunity to sneak into the main office and download all the evil plans. I say that’s the key scene, because in all the running and driving and shooting and fighting in the scenes that follow, somehow there’s no real sense of actual seriousness of the situation. It’s just action sequences piling on one another, interspersed with people sitting in front of computers and talking to each other. It’s all weightless and flashy.

There’s no getting around it, this is a shallow simple film, trying to (re) create a new American hero who’s as fast with a gun as he is with the numbers. There’s no chemistry here. None coming from Chris Pine, none coming from between him and Kiera Knightley (you’re more likely to believe them as friendly co-workers rather than in love with each other) and none coming from Kevin Costner, who really seems tired and old. The trailer made it look like there was going to be betrayals and surprises galore, but it lied. It’s really just Generic Super American Spy movie #285. What a waste. One forgotten ticket stub out of five.



- Peace out