Serve by Design

The NASA team, along with many of us watching the event from home, welcomed all four Artemis II astronauts home this past Friday at 7:07 CST after completing what seemed to us to be a flawless reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. The heat shield of the Orion capsule protected its precious cargo through 5,000 degrees of intensely dangerous heat at speeds of 25,000 miles per hour. Many of us whispered our prayers for the crew’s safety. Image: petapixel.com Described frequently as a “dynamic and dangerous mission,” this incredible journey to the moon did not disappoint! I was one among many other space travel enthusiasts who were wowed by the pictures the crew took, and enjoyed their cabin antics over the ten-day mission. This epic and dynamic flight, out and around the moon, required the execution of so many crucial steps and changes. Experts kept reminding us in this historic mission that “a lot of things had to go right” for this to be as successful as it appeared to be. And who could de...

When I was a boy, I went out summer evenings into the bottom ground of the Kaskaskia River hunting for raccoons with my dad and our next-door neighbor, Jim. Dad and Jim loved this sport and exercised their dogs in and out of season. The challenge for the dogs was to pick up and follow the coon scent all the way to the tree. Occasionally, and much to the displeasure of their owners, these highly trained canines would fall prey to other scents and be drawn away! "I smell something!" For years, I have known how hunting dogs have this heightened sense of smell, but I was surprised to recently learn that the African giant pouched rat also has the same ability! This species of large rodents is being used in some seventy-eight countries throughout the world where individuals have been victimized by landmines. Statistics show these dangerous unexploded ordnances kill or maim fifteen to twenty-thousand civilians each year! Research engineers, who work to study and train these specia...