It’s been a long but productive week for yours portly.  Readers will notice that, other than my recent #TBT features (yesterday and last Thursday’s posts), I’ve been mostly silent on the impeachment circus.  My general policy in this age of media perfidy is to withhold comment until the real facts have been reported.

The way everything is shaping up, my gut instincts—that there is nothing to claims that President Trump has committed impeachable offenses, defined constitutionally as “high crimes and misdemeanors”—seem validated.  Of course, that won’t stop the Democrats from expending months of energy, treasure, and rhetoric on banging the drum of impeachment.

In general, I’ve been trying to expand the focus of the blog, moving away from strictly writing about politics and politics-adjacent issues to more general interest topics.  My little piece on Saturn from a few weeks ago was enjoyable to write, and seemed to garner some positive feedback.

As such, I was excited to see that today marks the beginning of World Space Week.

Bing, the search engine I use at the risk of my peers heaping scorn upon me, had a little special screen about World Space Week, complete with shots of Jupiter.  Jupiter is a beautiful planet.  Whereas Saturn—my favorite non-terrestrial planet—possesses a cold, mysterious beauty, Jupiter seems more avuncular, a jovial, fat uncle of the lesser planets of the Solar System.

Little wonder, then, that Gustav Holst’s “Jupiter” is subtitled “Bringer of Jollity.”  Other than the epic, dangerous “Mars,” the “Jupiter” movement of Holst’s The Planets is the most famous, and certainly the most joyous.  Listen to the moving, beautiful “Jupiter Hymn” in the middle of the tune:

The next time you’re reading a declinist bemoan the collapse of Western civilization, listen to that section of the “Jupiter” movement, and you’ll know, on a visceral level, what we’re fighting to preserve.

But I digress.  I did not realize there was such an animal as a “World Space Week.”  I’m not much for arbitrary international holidays, which seem to be as abundant as gnats in South Carolina (in other words, exceedingly abundant), but space is certainly worth a week.

The start of World Space Week coincides with the launch of Sputnik, the plucky little Soviet satellite that terrified Americans going to the moon.  Sputnik was launched 4 October 1957, and could be seen orbiting the Earth.  That spooked Americans into investing millions of dollars into space exploration, leap-frogging the Soviets to the moon after the Ruskies picked the low-hanging fruit:  first man-made craft in orbit; first animal in orbit; first human in orbit.

Hopefully this year’s World Space Week will see the West shake off its complacency and yearn for the stars again.  Or we’ll just listen to more impeachment nonsense from House Democrats.  Talk about sacrificing the stars for the mud.