An astronaut’s view of 9/11
…[O]n the morning of Sept. 11, Culbertson, who had been in space for 30 days, had called down to mission control for a routine medical check-in.
“I asked the doctor how things were going. He responded: ‘We’re not having a very good day on Earth,'” Culbertson recalled.
Culbertson later discovered he had a more direct connection to the events of 9/11:
The next morning, he found out that a former Naval Academy classmate and good friend, Charles Burlingame, was the captain of American Airlines Flight 77, which had crashed into the [Pentagon] the day before.
The first set would imply that the space station was located north east of ny… and the view was looking somewhat south west… so i dont think that was from space
the second image is not from space, its from a helicopter.. thats the light and dark oscillations
the third set is the one that places the space station south nearer the equator, and to the west.
anyone know if the space station orbit trajectories are like? i can think of several orbits that would allow for the angles. i always thought it was equatorial since that would make mission planning easier and the distance shortest… and maximize the number of locations worldwide one could lift supplies.
The ISS orbital inclination is 51.6º according to Wikipedia. So it can pass over New York City.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station
It had to have a high inclination in order for it to be reachable by Russian-launched rockets.
An incredible story.
The orbit makes a path like a sine wave: those of us old enough to remember the Mission Control shots will remember that graphic. That’s how it gets so high above the equator and low below it.
It is true that all the space agencies try to launch from as close to the equator as possible, to get the planet’s additional 600+ mph kick in the pants. Rocket scientists will tell you every gain in velocity is precious, when you’re straining to get out of Earth’s gravity well. That’s why we launch from Florida, and the French favor the lower latitudes as well for Ariane. Boeing SeaLaunch (cool program; google) is sailing out of Long Beach to launch from right on the equator in the Pacific, from a converted oil rig as platform.
Another and more complete view of 9/11 should include Saudi Arabia’s role in that attack,but apparently our government decided–for whatever reason, perhaps it might have had something to do with oil–to redact and to push information pointing to their involvement down the memory hole (see http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=584410&p=1)
Good link, Wolla. I never saw Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, but I understand that he spent some time highlighting the Bush family’s Saudi ties.
I have always maintained that, instead of using guilt-by-association to score cheap partisan political points, Moore could have done the country a real service if he had explored the depth and breadth of Saudi influence in our entire political system, across both parties. Not to mention their influence in our universities and media.
Of course, there is a simple way to reduce their influence: Drill, Baby, Drill! And build modern thorium nuclear reactors. Funny how our political class is mostly uninterested in that.
As just one tiny facet of our government, the MSM, and the left’s attempts to push 9/11 down the memory hole–Washington Post and E.J. Dionne, I’m talkin’ to you–I note this recent article in the British press, which reports–contrary to my impression gathered from the MSM that only a few people jumped from the Towers–that there were 200 “jumpers” ( see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2035720/9-11-anniversary-America-wants-forget-victims-jumped-Twin-Towers.html) .
Boy, that one little piece of information alone, I suspect, would have, indeed, infuriated Americans and stuck in our consciousness and, as a consequence, our retaliatory response would, hopefully, have been much harsher, broader, deeper, and much more effectively directed–and so the extent and number of “jumpers” had to be and was very successfully suppressed.
P.S. The 200 or more figure is an estimate by sources other than our government; a tally that the government had no interest in making or publicizing.
According to the article I linked to above, the government was decidedly not interested in counting or publicizing just exactly how many jumpers there were, but there is one partial count, buried in a technical report on the Towers and 9/11 done by the government’ s National Institute for Standards and Technology, that gives a tally–based on the available TV coverage and film footage they found, of 104 jumpers.
I remember there being a lot of jumpers. They were discussed for a day or two afterwards, then they were forcibly shoved down the memory hole. Wouldn’t want to get the American people all upset and in the mood for righteous revenge.
People always jump from burning buildings. I think it is instinctive. Fire burns and causes intense pain, but more importantly, smoke makes it impossible to breathe. The instinct for breathing is so automatic that people will jump from a window just to get one more breath.
I remember reading Eddie Rickenbacker’s autobiography many years ago. He was America’s top fighter ace in World War I. For most of that war, pilots didn’t have parachutes. When their planes were hit by machine gun fire, they often burst into flames since they were built of wood and canvas, and had an engine and gas tank right in front of the pilot. Pilots frequently jumped to their deaths when their planes caught fire.
Rickenbacker told of his squadron commander, Raoul Lufbery, and how he constantly told the men never to jump from a burning plane since that meant certain death. Rather, they should try to fly their planes down to the ground and make a crash landing.
One day Lufbery’s plane was hit and burst into flame. He jumped.
Apropos of the buried 104 number above, I note that there are a lot of ways that government can hide information, with “hiding in plain sight” just one of many techniques.
One way is to issue mammoth bills or reports with no index, or with just a table of contents that lists major items only, with no further detail or, in the case of DOD budget documents, with no lists detailing the meaning of the very esoteric terminology used to identify various programs i.e. if you don’t know the precise terminology used to identify or describe a program, it becomes much harder to locate text concerning the program or activity; they can’t be accused of not releasing the information, they just don’t make it easy for you to find it.
In Congress, we saw how the Democrats released the multi-thousand page texts of Obamacare and other mammoth and highly complex bills to Republicans only a few hours before the vote on these bulls–obviously giving them far too little time to read, much less to comprehend very complex bills that are thousands of pages long (and, in one case, one of these thousand plus page bills had a 200+ page “manager’s amendment” from Harry Reed tacked on to it–one modifying an already hideously complex bill–just two or three hours before the vote).
Then, there are the redacted answers to FOIA requests that are so “redacted”–whole pages almost entirely blacked out except, perhaps, for a conjunction here or there–that no useful information can be gotten out of them.
Then, there are government websites that seem to deliberately make it hard to download information by using software protocols that are hard to synch with.
I spent several years doing research on WWII and Japanese atrocities and, in the course of that research, I discovered my favorite example of government burying information that it didn’t dare just totally suppress, for fear–I presume–of prosecution of those suppressing it at a later date, if such suppression were discovered.
In this case, the issue was one aspect of Japanese treatment of/atrocities against U.S. POWs held by the Japanese during WWII.
There had always been a rumor that the Japanese government had issued a “kill order” to its forces, ordering that all Allied POWs under its control were to be killed if the Japanese lost the war. Obviously, confirming that such a “kill order” had been issued, that there were such documents in existence, would have likely enraged citizens here in the U.S.–this at a time, just a few months after the Japanese surrender, when our government was trying to pacify an occupied Japan but, more importantly, was trying to transform our image of Japan, making it into our dependable ally, helping us to fight Communism.
Thus, I discovered that during the war crime trials of a few Japanese leaders we held in the Far East, a U.S. prosecutor did introduce such a Kill Order in a very brief colloquy with the judge that went something like this:
Prosecutor to Judge–I have here prosecution document #5678 that I would like to introduce into evidence.
Judge to Prosecutor–so ordered.
And that was that. The document was not totally suppressed but, was placed in evidence–so both the Prosecutor and the Judge had an out if questioned about this at a later date–but there is no clue given as to what this document was or what its significance might be, and only someone who had some clue as to where to look, and who very carefully read through the tens of thousands of pages of transcripts of this tribunal, and looked at the actual evidence introduced, might have spotted this document.
About the jumpers: I saw a news segment about the new 9/11 museum that will be opening (in about a year, I think?), and it said that there was a certain amount of controversy over whether to include photos of the jumpers. The decision was to include them.