I had a very busy day today. Or make that yesterday, since it’s almost 3 AM already.
I wanted write something about D-day. Eighty years. It’s been eighty years since Americans, Canadians, Britons and others of the Greatest Generation landed on the beaches of Normandy, opening a much-awaited second front in the global struggle against fascist totalitarianism.
The result: An imperfect, yet enduring world order, Pax Americana, which brought historically unprecedented peace, prosperity, and security to the majority of humans living on this planet.
Perfect it was not. Totalitarianism never vanished. Even after Stalin’s death, the USSR and its empire prevailed for another 36 years. Some of the worst excesses of communism were yet to come. And there were wars, big wars: I thought I’d list a few but there were too many. Even so, this was a period of global peace, a rules-based system that endured, beyond expectations I should say: When I was growing up, no sane adult existed anywhere I think who expected the world to survive beyond the year 2000 without a major nuclear war, yet here we are in 2024, and there are still no nuclear wastelands.
But eventually, all good things come to an end. This world order is crumbling. Will we survive without a civilizational catastrophe? I don’t know. I worry. Ukraine, the Middle East, Taiwan… who knows what else. The retreat of democracy and the rise authoritarianism. The storm is brewing.
Anyhow, enough about D-day. There were some good news. Boeing’s Starliner, though limping a little, made it to the International Space Station. Those astronauts were brave souls. Considering recent news from Boeing, their newfangled attitude towards quality control and safety, I expected, feared rather, a disaster. I am relieved that it has not happened, but NASA should still dump that overpriced, unsafe contraption.
Meanwhile, Musk’s SpaceX had a major success: Starship completed a full test, involving successful launch and “landing” (onto the ocean for now) of both its first stage and Starship itself. The re-entry was not without challenges, but they made it. This is a big milestone, a very big one. The promise of Starship is basically the holy grail of space travel: Fully reusable, rapidly refurnished vehicles. The fiery reentry was perhaps a bit more dramatic than planned, but the spacecraft made it, and that means that they can learn from the issues and improve both the vehicle and its landing procedure.
And I was only marginally paying attention because I am still struggling with forced upgrades: CentOS 7, the Linux version that I’ve been using since 2016, is coming up EOL (end-of-life) which means I must upgrade. But I cannot upgrade to CentOS because Red Hat turned CentOS into a bleeding edge version of Linux with a short support cycle. Joy. Anyhow, today I managed to complete another milestone of my transition plan, so I may still be able to get everything done in time.