Tarantula Hawk’ blasts off

It’s the second to last weekend of March and Sean Kean is pacing back-and-forth clutching a microphone in his hand as he read’s off of a sheet of paper: 

“Pad 21 now, where we have John’s ‘Tarantula Hawk’ on a I-327, expected to go to about  2,800 feet” 

“That’s almost 3,000 feet” a young spectator realizes.

All spectators gaze to the sky as they watch the rocket’s ascent. Listen closely, and you can hear some of their nervous voices quietly chanting “separate, c’mon, separate”

A small explosion releases a parachute that gently glides the rocket back to meet its owner. Sighs of relief, as there is no malfunction in which the parachute can be tangled upon release, increasing the rockets velocity as it descends often dangerously and unpredictably toward spectators below.

Dogging rockets is always fun. 

Tucson’s nuclear role during the Cold War was one of America’s best-kept secrets of its time. Now home to the only persevered intercontinental ballistic missile site in the country, it acts as an uneasy reminder of what could have happened, but what thankfully never did.

The Titan II ICBM was engineered out of our nation’s greatest fear of Armageddon. The ability to end the world as we know it created an undeniable sense of discomfort, but it also gave a strange sense of relief knowing if the Soviet Union were to erase the United States off the map, the U.S. had the ability to take the Soviets with them.

“There was a general anxiety here as well as in the rest of the country on the question of an atomic war—the fear that the Americans and the Russians would get into it and the obvious destruction that would follow,” said George Miller, former Tucson mayor and long-time Tucson resident.

The director of The Arizona Department of Veterans’ Services resigned and an assistant he hired was fired Wednesday after Arizona-Sonora News Service reported that the new hire said menstrual cycles might be too problematic for women to be in combat. 

Joey Strickland resigned after the article on the new hire, former Tucson lawmaker Terri Proud, according to a spokesman for the governor’s office.

“It’s fair to say that we voiced concerns regarding our learning of a recent hire of his via the news media,” said Matt Benson, spokesman for the Governor’s Office.

Hiring Proud in the first place went against specific instructions from the Governor’s Office. Benson said the governor had warned Strickland not to hire Proud.

“Col. Strickland was given very specific instructions about a year ago to avoid hiring this individual. He chose to do so anyway and unfortunately that individual’s questionable judgment was on display this week with some ill chosen public remarks regarding women in the military,” Benson said.

Benson didn’t say why the Governor’s Office didn’t want Proud hired.

Large trafficking of illegal immigration and drug cartels are the highlighted topics in media outlets, but residents along the United States-Mexico border believe that often times these topics are taken out of context.

To them, it’s a just a place to call home.

Ada Wilkinson-Lee, a Latin American Studies professor at the University of Arizona, grew up in Douglas, along the Southwest border. She said she could hear crossers, but never feared them. Wilkinson- Lee’s research today is in Latino health and border communities.