Free Republic

Circa 1997, I was in Panama, on the Caribbean side, getting my boat ready to transit the canal to the Pacific. I was walking from Colon's old so-called yacht club (now long gone) through an industrial port area to get to Colon City. When I was passing about 20 fallow acres, I witnessed a training exercise by a dozen or so off-road motorbikes in green paint, each with a pair of uniformed soldiers on them. The soldiers riding on the back each carried a carbine. While I watched from a few hundred yards away, they did a "reverse starburst," that...

LOS ANGELES - A NASA spacecraft bound for Mars is nearing the end of its seven-month journey but still faces a white-knuckle arrival at a planet known for swallowing scientific probes, mission managers said Friday. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO, is on course to enter orbit around the Red Planet on March 10. If successful, it will spend the next two years photographing the surface and scouting for future landing sites. The spacecraft is performing so well that engineers have canceled two final maneuvers to adjust its course in the last leg of the trip, said James Graf, project...