Angel in Flight

I don't recall following any manned space mission this closely since.. I don't remember when. Even though I didn't start watching anything until the 6th day of the mission for the lunar flyby. I took lots of screenshots as mementos. Today I recorded a few video clips from the YouTube stream.

I tuned in during yesterday evening's "live downlink event", which was already in progress, with the crew answering questions over a video stream. The first answers I heard them give, inspirational messages for their kids and young relatives, were quite touching. It made me nervous, remembering that something bad could still happen today during re-entry.

Today, I've had the live-stream on in the background while trying to work.

I had the memory of one space shuttle disaster in the back of my mind. But that one was during take off, of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986.

Then I vaguely remembered another disaster which happened during re-entry. On looking it up, that was Space Shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated during re-entry on Feb 1, 2003. I remember it happening, seeing news about it on TV, but not the details of where I was or what I'd been doing. It was in the morning. Was I awake, watching it live on TV? I suspect I was. That was 3 months before I posted my first LiveJournal entry, so I have no post about it here. I don't recall writing anything about it in my paper journals. There's nothing from that date on my website.

I'm finding myself very nervous that something could go wrong today.
There's this superstition I've had for a long time. Not so much as when I was a kid, but still a little. That if you plan ahead, considering a bad thing which could happen, that will make it less likely to happen (and if not, at least you may be more prepared for it). That's why I was thinking of the other disasters and reading about them again. But there's also a part of me which thinks that even posting about it could jinx things. So I won't post this until later. It is now 18:37 EDT. About one hour before re-entry starts.

..

Well, I am relieved. Tears came to my eyes upon hearing one of the crewmember's voices after the blackout period during re-entry.

I am of mixed feelings about the overall Artemis mission. But having astronauts fly around the moon, and drift weightlessly through their spacecraft, is a very neat thing.

I just had a memory of a TV show from the 80s or 90s, in which one of the main female actresses, a high school student, aspired to become an astronaut. Back then, the main way to do that, or even a requirement, was to be a jet fighter pilot. There was an arc about her fighting to join the Air Force for that even though women weren't allowed to be in combat positions back then.

I am remembering a specific character in a specific show, but when I check Wikipedia, and 2 LLMs, they mention nothing at all about that.
So as not to taint anyone else's memory, I don't want to list the show or character names in the post. Maybe I am mixing it up with some other TV show. But do any of you remember what I am remembering? Feel free to put the names in the comments.

Copilot mentions another show with a slightly similar plot, but I don't think that's the one I was remembering.

At first, I couldn't figure out what landmass was shown in this photo of the Earth from Artemis II, and what orientation it was in:
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/hello-world/

Some LLMs out there are multi-modal, able to take images as input. I thought they might be able to analyze the photo, comparing it against known coastlines, to figure it out. So I asked a few, "In the image on this page, what landmass is shown in the image of Earth?" along with the URL.

Mistral indicated Greenland. It said it was reasonably confident and mentioned the landmass being a "large, white, icy region", which indicated to me it didn't actually "look" at the photo.

Google Gemini indicated it was "the dark side of the Earth", again indicating it didn't actually analyze the photo.

Microsoft Copilot gave a much better answer, mentioning details that were really in the photo. It thought it was Australia, which was my first guess too. But the lower left part showing city lights didn't seem to match Australia's shape; the "island" was too close to the mainland to be Tasmania.
I finally figured out that the North pole is towards the bottom of the image, the large landmass is northwest Africa, the lit-up part is Spain and Gibraltar, and South America is on the right side.
When I asked Copilot to guess again, it rightly said Africa, but a different part of it. On the third try, it got it correct.