Hasta La Gadget!

Russian Prisoners and Equipment Captured at the Battle of Tannenberg

The Eastern Front: Tannenberg & the Masurian Lakes

The war on the Eastern Front began with the Austrian-Hungarian invasion of Serbia in July 1914. It would progressively grow to encompass a vast geography stretching from the Baltic Sea in the west to Minsk in the east, and from St. Petersburg in the north to the Balkans and the Black Sea in the south. This was a front of almost 1,000 miles. The absence of many natural defensive features and the relative low density of troops defending it, compared with the Western Front, created a far more fluid battlefield. Front lines were often broken, creating dramatic swings in the geography controlled by both sides. Trench warfare, the mainstay of the Western Front, was never developed to any great extent in the east.

Tsar Nicholas II’s Imperial Russian Army, once it had mobilized, was, on paper at least, a formidable foe. Operating under the command of the Tsar’s cousin, Grand Duke Nicholas, it had at its disposal on the Eastern Front, 1.2 million men including 70 infantry and 24 cavalry divisions. It possessed an arsenal of almost 7,900 field guns, howitzers and heavy guns. The German General Staff’s fear of the “Russian Steam Roller” was well placed.

The Russian Advance

The German General Staff believed that it would take Russia a minimum of six weeks to mobilize its troops. In less than three weeks, however, the Russian First Army, commanded by General Pavel Rennenkampf, and the Second Army of General Alexander Samsonov began to advance into East Prussia. With most of the German forces deployed on the Western Front, they met weak opposition. Though there was little organized defense, the advance of the two armies was slowed by the hordes of German civilians fleeing westward in their path. Schlieffen had always anticipated the possibility of a rapid Russian advance, but this advance had started earlier and was more rapid than expected.

To counter the Russian advance, General Paul von Hindenburg, hastily brought out of retirement, and General Erich Ludendorff, who had just secured Liège, were rushed to the Eastern Front. A complete corps of 25,000 men was detached from General Helmut Moltke’s forces in the west and transferred by rail towards East Prussia. Two more corps would be dispatched to reinforce the Eastern Front, further reducing the strength of the German drive on Paris.

The Russian First Army had reached Konigsberg, with the Second Army to its south, when, on August 22, the now reinforced German 8th Army encircled Samsonov at Tannenberg. The German commanders, bolstered by the belief that personal animosity between the two Russian generals would prevent them from reinforcing each other, planned to attack each of them in turn.

Von Hindenburg and Ludendorff were right. Rennenkampf delayed until it was too late and, over seven days, Samsonov’s army was systematically destroyed. Out of a force of 180,000 men, 60,000 were either killed or wounded, 100,000 were captured and only 10,000 escaped. No fewer than 60 trains were needed to transport captured Russian equipment back to Germany. The Battle of Tannenberg remains one of the most lopsided victories in the annals of warfare.

Ludendorff and Hindenburg now turned their attention to Rennenkampf and the Russian First Army in the region of the Masurian Lakes. Reinforced with the addition of the Guards Reserve Corps and the XI Corps, the Germans now had a numerical advantage over the Russians. Hindenburg attempted to outflank the Russian First Army, but Rennenkampf was able to withdraw back towards the Russian border, and the protection of the border forts, with most of his army intact.

The Battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes were a triumph for the German 8th Army. In the space of a month, it had destroyed the Russian Second Army, badly mauled the First Army and ejected all Russian troops from German soil. Those gains came at a price, however. The reinforcements had come at the expense of German forces in the west and their absence would be missed at the upcoming Battle of the Marne. Whether their presence there would have made a difference is a subject of endless debate among military historians.

The Germans’ success in the first major battles on the Eastern Front highlighted the incompetence of much of the Russian high command. The Russian army had a relatively tiny, trained officer corps and, unlike many other armies, an inexperienced cadre of NCOs. Soldiers were conscripted at the age of twenty for six years and served a further nine in the reserves. They received little training, however. More than 60 percent of their soldiers were illiterate.

In addition, the country had, for its size, few railways and less than 5,000 miles of roads with hard surfaces. Even in good weather this could present a problem, but in the Russian winter, resupply and deployment could be incredibly slow. Though brave and tenacious, the Russian infantry often lacked adequate artillery support and was always desperately short of ammunition. In August of 1914 there were only two ambulances in the entire Russian army. Motorized transport was limited to 679 cars; most of which were reserved for the use of officers.

NASA astronaut Steven Nagel, who flew four space shuttle missions, died Thursday (Aug. 21). He was 67.

Steven Nagel died after a long battle with cancer, the Association of Space Explorers stated on Facebook. The international organization, to which Nagel belonged, includes more than 350 men and women who have flown in space.

Nagel joined the astronaut corps in 1978 with NASA’s first group of trainees selected for the space shuttle program. Although he was chosen to pilot the orbiter, his first flight was as a mission specialist, a position generally assigned to scientists and engineers.

NASA portrait of STS-55 mission commander Steven Nagel.

“I really wanted to fly as a pilot, so at the time — because there was no explanation that went with it — I wondered, ‘Are they telling me I’m not good enough to fly as a pilot?'” Nagel told a NASA interviewer about his 1985 assignment to the shuttle Discovery’s STS-51G crew. “Nothing against mission specialists. I would trade my pilot’s slot to go be a mission specialist and do a [spacewalk], certainly, but it’s just that ‘What are they trying to tell me here?'”

“But I think what it really was, our class was very large, and they’re getting down to the point where I think [they] probably wanted to get us all flown, and this was a way to do it a little quicker,” Nagel recalled. [7 Space Shuttle Astronaut Firsts]

Nagel’s first week in Earth orbit included helping to deploy three communications satellites for AT&T, Mexico and the Arab Satellite Communications Organization, as well as a free-flying platform devoted to astronomy experiments and an experiment for the Department of Defense’s Strategic Defense Initiative (colloquially known as “Star Wars”).

In the pilot seat

Nagel’s turn in the pilot seat came on his second flight.

Nagel launched in late October 1985 as part of the eight-member STS-61A crew onboard space shuttle Challenger. The week-long flight, which set the still-standing record for the most people to have launched and landed on the same spacecraft, was also the first shuttle mission to be funded and directed by another nation: the former West Germany, overseeing the European-built Spacelab module mounted in Challenger’s payload bay.

“Not having a U.S. manager made it more complex, but I see that mission was kind of an early lead-in to the space station,” Nagel told a NASA interviewer in 2002. “Maybe in a way a Spacelab is kind of like a mini space station. You are doing scientific work, but your space station is inside the shuttle, and you’re up there, in our case, a week.”

As the mission’s pilot, Nagel did not have much to do with 75 experiments being conducted inside the Spacelab, but that left time for observing the planet below.

“Jokingly, I said all I did on the second mission was purge fuel cells, dump water, take pictures, and prepare meals for the crew. I had no responsibility for any experiments in the back, so we were helping them out as much as we could,” Nagel told a NASA interviewer in 2002.

“The orbiter crew had time to look out the window,” Nagel noted. “So it was just a bonanza of Earth observations. It was great.”

The worst of times, the best of times

The STS-61A mission was the last successful flight of the shuttle Challenger before the orbiter and its 51L mission’s crew was lost in flight in January 1986. Nagel watched the ill-fated launch from a conference room at Johnson Space Center in Houston, but he was promptly sent to Florida to assist with the recovery of the shuttle’s debris.

He then represented the Astronaut Office in NASA’s effort to develop a crew escape system to improve the safety of the orbiters. Initially, the idea was to use a rocket-powered extraction method but ultimately a simpler extendable pole was adopted.

“This was my best time at NASA, actually,” Nagel stated. “Nothing I ever did was more fulfilling than that two years, to be honest, even flying.”

“This was better, because everybody was so focused on getting the shuttle flying again,” he remarked.

The shuttle was returned to flight in 1988, and three years later, Nagel followed as the commander of Atlantis’ STS-37 crew. The six-day mission was charged with deploying the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (GRO), the second of NASA’s “Great Observatories,” which also included the Hubble Space Telescope.

“The GRO was big,” Nagel said. “It was not physically as long as the Hubble, but it weighed a lot more. It was a lot denser. It was a great big thing, about 35,000 pounds, and it had three appendages that had to unfold once you get it out in the end of the [shuttle’s robotic] arm.”

The first two of those appendages, the solar array wings, extended slowly one at a time. The third however, failed to move. To fix the problem, crew members Jerry Ross and Jay Apt were sent outside on a spacewalk.

“That was the first — what would you call it? Unscheduled EVA,” Nagel said. “It was planned as a contingency, but it was certainly not on the schedule. It was successful.”

Fourth and final flight

Nagel’s fourth and final launch in April 1993 got off to a late start. Already delayed from February due to technical concerns, the shuttle Columbia’s three main engines shut down at just T-3 seconds prior to liftoff as a result a valve leak on March 22. The abort postponed the flight another month as all three engines were replaced.

Once in space, Nagel and his STS-55 mission crewmates conducted experiments as part of the second German-led Spacelab flight. They also became on-orbit plumbers.

“‘You’ve got to stop using the toilet.’ Sounds funny on the ground. For real, this is, there was nothing life-threatening about it, but it could be mission-threatening. If you cannot get this problem resolved, you’re coming home. And what a tragedy that would be for the millions of dollars invested in this mission,” Nagel told a NASA interviewer.

A nitrogen leak had disabled the system used to flush the waste water from the toilet. So Nagel and his crew had to divert the water from its tank into a contingency bag.

“Periodically we’d have to empty the bag,” Nagel recalled. “You dump the water overboard out a port on the side of the orbiter … except instead of gas pressure to dump, one of us would have to squeeze the bag to dump the waste water.”

“It got us through the mission,” Nagel continued. “So who argues with success?”

Overall, the mission was a success. Over the course of the ten days, the flight logged the 365th day in space for the shuttle fleet and 100th day in orbit for Columbia. With the landing, Nagel had spent a total of 30 days, 1 hour and 34 minutes in space.

Continue reading at collectSPACE about astronaut Steven Nagel’s life before and after his four space shuttle missions.

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2014 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.

• NASA’s Space Shuttles: Where Are They Now?
• Giant Leaps: Top Milestones of Human Spaceflight
• How To Become An Astronaut

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A scientist has created the best-ever global color map of Neptune’s big moon Triton, using images taken by a NASA spacecraft 25 years ago.

Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston produced the map after restoring photos snapped by the Voyager 2 probe during its flyby of Neptune and Triton on Aug. 25, 1989. The new map has also been turned into a minute-long movie of Voyager 2’s historic Triton encounter — the first and only time a spacecraft has ever visited the Neptune system.

The new map, which has a resolution of 1,970 feet (600 meters) per pixel, may help bring enigmatic Triton back into the spotlight. [Photos of Neptune, The Mysterious Blue Planet]

Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute used data from NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, which flew by Neptune and its big moon Triton on Aug. 25, 1989, to create this best-ever global color map of the moon.

“In the intervening quarter century and its many discoveries, I think we have tended to forget how strange and exotic Triton really is!” Schenk wrote in a blog post Thursday (Aug. 21).

“Its effective surface age may be a little as 10 million years [old], clearly implying that active geology is going on today,” he added. “The cantaloupe terrain, which I interpreted back in 1993 as due to crustal overturn (diapirism), hasn’t been seen anywhere else. The volcanic region, with its smooth plains and volcanic pits large and small, is the size of Texas. And the southern terrains still defy interpretation.”

Schenk produced the map using green, blue and orange filters. Colors have been enhanced to accentuate contrast but still show Triton roughly as human eyes would see it, NASA officials said.

In an interesting twist, NASA’s New Horizons probe is scheduled to cross the orbit of Neptune on Monday (Aug. 25), 25 years to the day after Voyager 2’s encounter. New Horizons is streaking toward a flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015 that should return the first good looks at the distant dwarf planet and its moons.

The connections between Voyager 2 and New Horizons don’t stop there; Triton and Pluto are very similar to each other in some ways. Both are just slightly smaller than Earth’s moon, possess thin, nitrogen-dominated atmospheres and have various ices (of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen) on their surfaces, Schenk noted.

“What will we see at Pluto? Guesses have ranged from active geology to cold and cratered, so we are in for a suspenseful summer next year!” he wrote on his blog.

“Triton is of importance as it offers clues to what geologic features might look like on Pluto, given that the icy crusts of both bodies are probably rather similar and would presumably react in similar ways under internal stress and heat,” he added. “So if there were or are volcanoes on Pluto, they could look similar to those we see on Triton.”

Voyager 2 launched in August 1977, a few weeks before its twin, Voyager 1. The pair conducted an unprecendented “grand tour” of the outer solar system, returning good looks at the Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune systems.

Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 then kept right on flying. Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in August 2012, and Voyager 2 (which took a different route through the solar system) is poised to do so soon.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

• Voyager 2’s ‘Hair-Raising’ Fly-By Of Triton Animated
• Neptune Quiz: How Well Do You Know the Other Blue Planet?
• Photos from NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 Probes
• Moons of Neptune: Giant Blue Planet’s 14 Satellites Unmasked (Infographic)

Copyright 2014 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Mindfulness is on the map. TIME Magazine ran it on its cover last January: “The Mindful Revolution.” The Chicago Tribune headlined it: Use mindfulness to pull yourself out of a funk. An article in The New York Times urges us to use mindfulness and meditation as a powerful resource in healthy living. The Washington Post challenges us to be mindful at work. The Huffington Post offers 5 mindful things to do every day. And Forbes touts mindfulness as a tool for success. (And we all know what Forbes means when they talk about $ucce$$.)

It’s like a miracle or something. Mindfulness has been my dearest pursuit for as long as I can remember. I just didn’t know what word to attach to it. And maybe that was because I was fairly positive that mainstream society wouldn’t support it. I’ve never been very good at being called names. So in an effort to lessen the offense, I decided to call myself a writer and moved to Montana where nobody seemed to care one way or another.

I have spent the last 25 years living in Montana, writing with all my mindful might. The natural world is the perfect stage to develop this practice, this prayer, this meditation, and sometimes, this way to life. I fiercely believe that creative self-expression on the page should be up there with diet and exercise as a therapeutic tool in the realm of preventative wellness … whether or not it adds up to a published work. Writing is the best way I know to process this beautiful and heartbreaking thing called life. And nature has been my best writing (mindfulness) teacher, calling me to retreat into my most sacred, quiet, deliberate place, and find the wilderness of my words.

This time of year is a loyal reminder of the power of retreating into that still place. As summer winds down, my muse steps out of the huckleberry bushes and mountain lakes, stretches and notices the trajectory of things. Like dragonflies on screens, Monarchs on Echinacea, and bats hanging in eaves, this is the time of year when I stop the flurry of my summer checklist, and start to imagine the world white again. Dormant. Where I get still, the world sleeps, the wood stove teases ideas into words which turn into stories, and most important, morph into understanding.

Late summer’s corner into autumn is the perfect time to abide with the rhythms of the natural world. To pay attention to how it prepares slowly, methodically, mindfully, for that dormancy. Nothing is an accident. Every winged thing knows that everything counts, especially the ones who stay. Every hibernating creature is taking stock, making sure it has just the right kind of burrow with the right kind of egress. I follow their lead, preparing for a winter of words.

It’s the same every year. After months of ignoring the stacks in my house, the clutter in my closets, the flung grenades in my garage, I find myself hungry to clean it all out. I go through my pantry, making sure I have the basics: flour, sugar, clean Mason jars for the jam and canned tomatoes I’ll put up in a few weeks. I gather the gardening tools which have been too long leaning against fences, hose them down, return them to their home in the shed. And my office — I divide the things that I thought would matter from the things that do matter — trash the former, file the latter. In other words, I throw away a lot.

All of this is in anticipation of autumnal work which I have learned is essential to my winter work. Autumn is the time to prime the pump of my creative flow. Prime it so that it will flow through deep freeze. Autumn is the time for mindfulness at its best: It’s the time for retreat.

With the first hint of chill, I know that it’s time to retreat into that free zone which summer has procured. I sleep with my windows wide open to let the night air roll over me, hoping that it will filter into my dreams and fuel my muse. I keep my journal close to my bed, and I wake up early and open it, feeling my words sift through my mind’s fingers like the larch needles that will fall in early October. I let them come. I don’t think about how they might stack up. I don’t need them to add up to anything other than freedom. Permission. Hunger. Need. The work will come in winter. For now it’s time to stretch my mind, loosen what has lodged there in the summer months, let it flow.

Where do we get this free zone in life? Where is pure expression without scrutiny ever exercised in our lives? When I am in this corner season, I am less interested in the words, and more interested in where they come from. It’s like a portal place. An opening deep in the forest where I used to imagine the animals and fairies and teddy bears went in the nighttime to dance around bonfires. I believed in that place as a little girl. When I am finding and releasing words in this way, I am that little girl again. We all need to be that child. Children know that freedom is more than a high concept or a goal or that it comes with a cost. They know that it is a place inside us and they know they have to access it in order to do everything else that constitutes living.

That’s what writing is for me. That free zone. That place behind the words and stories. And that’s what I want other people to know. It’s not unlike the birds and chipmunks preparing for winter. It’s taking stock. It’s finding the basics. It’s procuring survival. It is a retreat into self. I believe in retreats as a vital way to tap into that creative self-expression on the page. I know I need them and I believe other people do too. So in the spirit of what I have been practicing for many years, mindful writing, I started Haven Retreats.

This fall, 40 brave “grown-ups” will come to Montana to dig deeply into that wilderness that lives in them. Some will call themselves “writers.” Some will not. Some will have stories they want to write. Some will simply hope for words to come and to meet them on the page like new friends. It’s my job to lead them to their words by inspiring them to go places they would not likely go on their own. To facilitate an experience for them that they can walk away with and weave into their daily lives. When people do this sort of work, they become aware of who they are; that portal place in the woods where they dance around bon-fires, unabashed.

The act of going on a retreat is not woo woo. Leaving our daily lives behind and retreating into our primal rhythms, our purest flow, has been done since the beginning of time. The Native Americans went on Vision Quests. Jesus went to the desert. Buddha went to the Bo tree. Muhammad went to a cave. From those retreats came stories and words. Wise words that have lasted ages and profoundly informed how our civilization endures. Mindfulness, especially on a retreat, is ancient practice. It’s no small surprise then, that our country’s major publications consider this important “news.” With the stresses of our current world, people are understanding the value of what we have lost and what nature does intuitively. Mindfully. Deliberately. Creating ourselves over and over again. And that, indeed, is miraculous.

Earlier on Huff/Post50:

Have you ever dreamed of attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?

We all know the magical school doesn’t really exist, but if you want to have a Hogwarts-esque experience, the University of Oxford is the next best thing. And you can now rent rooms there for an affordable $158 a night.

Keble College, one of the largest colleges at the University, offers 300 “bed and breakfast“-style accommodations so tourists can have an epic collegiate experience.

Guests will eat breakfast in the school’s stately Victorian dining hall and have access to dinners at the dining hall and the college bar.

According to the Daily Mail, a single ensuite room with a view of the quad will run you about $108 per night, while a double costs $158. The rooms are available during the summer, when school is not in session. This year’s fall term begins Oct. 12.

“Staying in Oxford university in the summer is one of the UK’s best-kept secrets,” spokeswoman Angela Southall told the Daily Mail. “Stay in historic, culturally fascinating surroundings, meet some of the most interesting people you’ll ever meet and all for a fraction of the cost of a hotel.”

While other U.K. schools offer similar accommodations, the stunning buildings at Keble College and Oxford can’t be beat. While in Oxford, tourists can check out the university’s campus, track down some “Harry Potter” filming locations, visit the Bodleian Library and enjoy the historic city.