Fri, July 20, 2012
Communion on the Moon: The Religious Experience in Space
By
Rebecca J. Rosen
NASA
Before the launch this weekend of three human beings into the ether
of space around the Earth, before they boarded their Soyuz spacecraft,
and before the rockets were fired, precautions were taken. Not the
humdrum checklists and redundancies of space exploration -- assessing
the weather, the equipment, the math -- but a preparation with a more
mystical dimension: the blessing, by a Russian Orthodox priest, of the
spacecraft, as it sat on the launchpad on the Kazakh steppe.
The scene, as shown in NASA photographs such as the one above,
presents a tableau that seems incongruent, but may just be fitting.
"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the
face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the
waters and God said, 'Let there be light," Borman read.
And it was so.
See "Link to External Source Article" below to read further.
This is a thoughtful, inspiring article about space travel, and the urge of astronauts to bring their own brand of spirituality into the experience. CLICK HERE to see the rest of the article, including a voice-recording of a Biblical reading of Genesis while viewing the "Blue Marble" shot of our beloved Urantia, and an account of a communion service conducted on the moon by Buzz Aldrin.
Space travel probably does bring feelings of humility and awe to one who has that privilege, and rightly so...
Labels:
Rebecca J. Rosen
space travel
astronauts
religion
science
NASA
space launch
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Fri, March 30, 2012
The Holy Cosmos: The New Religion of Space Exploration
By
Ross Andersen
Mar 29 2012, 7:05 AM ET
Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson are high priests, astronauts are like saints that ascend into heaven, and
extraterrestrials are as gods -- benevolent, wise, and capable of
manipulating space and time.
Think about how you feel when you see the Earth from space or the Apollo astronauts walking on the moon. These images are achievements of science, sure, but they also have a religious feel to them; they tug at something deeper than engineering, something sublime. When viewed as a whole, space exploration has a lot in common with religion. It offers us a salvation narrative, for instance, whereby we put our faith in technology in order to be delivered to new worlds. Its priests, figures like Neil deGrasse Tyson, extoll its virtues in what sound like sermons. In its iconography, astronauts are like saints that ascend into heaven and extraterrestrials are like gods---benevolent, kind, wise, capable of manipulating space and time.
This idea of seeing space exploration as a religion has a long history, dating back to the Russians of the early twentieth century, many of whom self-identified as "Cosmists." From there it migrated to German rocket scientists like Werner von Braun, who took his ideas about space travel to America after the Second World War. Americans were slow to warm to space exploration. They saw it as a fantasy, but that changed as Americans began to regard technology with a new reverence in the postwar period. Today Americans are the most fervent Cosmists on the planet, even if manned space exploration seems to have stalled for the time being.
This is an interesting interview, and seems to strike at a nerve for this Urantia Book reader. Maybe you, too...
From
The Urantia Book:
56:10.5
The attainment of cosmologic levels of thought includes:
1. Curiosity.
Hunger for harmony and thirst for beauty. Persistent attempts to
discover new levels of harmonious cosmic relationships.
2.
Aesthetic appreciation.
Love of the beautiful and ever-advancing appreciation of the artistic
touch of all creative manifestations on all levels of reality.
3.
Ethic sensitivity.
Through the realization of truth the appreciation of beauty leads to
the sense of the eternal fitness of those things which impinge upon the
recognition of divine goodness in Deity relations with all beings; and
thus even cosmology
leads to the pursuit of divine reality values—to
God-consciousness.
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Link to External Source Article
Fri, April 15, 2011
The Blue Marble Shot: Our First Complete Photograph of Earth
By
Al Reinert
The Blue Marble Shot: Our First Complete Photograph of Earth
By Al Reinert
Apr 12 2011, 10:49 AM ET
The incredible story behind an image we've all seen hundreds of times, possibly the most reproduced photograph in history
It's an iconic image we have all seen hundreds of times, possibly
thousands, and probably the most widely reproduced photograph in
history. Because it's in the public domain it has been used for
everything from car commercials to the Earth Day flag, printed on
T-shirts, postage stamps, billboards, book covers, mouse pads -- most
any surface you can print on. It even has its own Facebook page. In the
NASA archive its formal designation is AS17-148-22727 but it's commonly
known as The Blue Marble Shot, and forty years later we still aren't
sure who actually took it.
It was the first photograph taken of the whole round Earth and the
only one ever snapped by a human being. You can't see the Earth as a
globe unless you get at least twenty thousand miles away from it, and
only 24 humans ever went that far into outer space. They were the
three-man crews of the nine Apollo missions that traveled to the moon
between 1968 and 1972, six of which landed there successfully (three men
went twice). But only the last three saw a full Earth.
In order to see our planet as a fully illuminated globe you need to
pass through a point between it and the sun, which is a narrower window
than you might think if you're traveling at 20,000 miles an hour. Most
of the men who flew lunar missions saw neither a full Earth nor a full
moon; both heavenly bodies were partly in shadow -- complementary
shadows, like lovers walking past a streetlamp -- the entire flight.
Their trajectories were determined by the landing sites they were
scouting or targeting, and those were mainly on the eastern face of the
moon as seen from Earth.
If you were at the controls of a spacecraft attempting to land on the
moon you wanted the sun behind you at an angle between seven and twelve
degrees above the horizon, so it cast long shadows from boulders you
might not see otherwise. This means that you were aimed at a crescent
moon when you launched from Earth three days before. The first landing
on Apollo 11, for instance, blasted off toward a new quarter-moon and
the crew saw no more than a three-quarter Earth.
It wasn't until the last Apollo mission that NASA targeted a landing
site on the far western face of the moon: the rumpled Valley of Taurus
Littrow, which earthly geologists thought might be the least disturbed
and thus primordial of the possible landing sites. This meant launching
toward a nearly full moon, which in turn meant departing from Florida at
night. It was the only night launch of the mighty Saturn V, the most
stupendous rocket ever built, and took place on December 7, 1972.
The three men atop the rocket were Eugene Cernan, the Commander of
Apollo 17; Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, the Lunar Module Pilot who would
accompany Cernan down to the surface if all went well; and Ron Evans,
the Command Module Pilot who would remain in lunar orbit, keeping their
return ship running while his crewmates did the glamorous exploring. All
three have claimed that they took the famous Blue Marble Shot.
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Please click HERE to read the entire article
Unfortunately, the credit of who took this iconic photo is in dispute, but we thought it would be of interest to others to read about the events of the day when it was shot, and the ensuing controversy. And - it's great to see the picture again...Urantia - the "sentimental shrine of Nebadon"
Labels:
Urantia
earth
blue marble
astronauts
space travel
Eugene Cernan
Harrison "Jack" Schmitt
Apollo 17
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