Overnight on Tuesday I had the privilege to announce on Radio 2 that billionaire Elon Musk had successfully launched the most powerful rocket to date – with his old red TESLA sportscar strapped onto it with a mannequin ‘driving’ the thing (see the last ever image of it on this page courtesy SpaceX). Since then, the vessel’s third burn has been successful…exceeding an orbit of Mars and continuing on towards the Asteroid Belt.
Also this week, NASA released a record-breaking photo taken by the New Horizons spacecraft when it was nearly 4 billion miles away from the Earth.
The images released are the farthest from Earth ever captured by a spacecraft – even more than the Voyager 1 space probe when it turned towards the Earth in 1990 and took a picture of a tiny dot.
Before his untimely death, US astronomer Carl Sagan reflected on the significance of that image, famously coining its name as the “Pale Blue Dot”, and giving one of the most widely published speeches of all time.
If you’ve never heard that speech, you’re in for a treat. If you have, give it another go. More than ever we need to hear the sage words of an eminent philosopher. And what better way to do it than in our weekly chill out to the music of Ludovico Einaudi with his sublime “The Earth Prelude”?
Watch the video, hear the music and absorb the moving words that will hopefully help us all in the coming week.
As ever thanks for being part of something special x
Thank you for the MMM
Excellent as always -especially this week’s
Thank you Mike for a lovely MMM.