The storyline, which involves the Avengers intervening in an intergalactic war between the alien Kree and Shi'ar empires, is notable for reigniting the longstanding antagonism between Captain America and Iron Man and its impact upon the status quo for Marvel's alien empires, with the Shi'ar annexing the Kree Empire.
Operation Galactic Storm
The title of the storyline is an allusion to Operation: Desert Storm, the Pentagon's operational title for the 1991 Gulf War, which had been recently resolved when the idea for "Operation: Galactic Storm" was conceived. Although the phrase is featured in the storyline (it is the name the Avengers give to their own deployment) the plot bears no real relation to the Gulf conflict and was apparently not intended to have any overt parallels with it, save the obvious fact that "Operation: Galactic Storm" also involved a major conflict.
The Avengers divide into three teams: one will stay on Earth, the second will visit the Kree, and the third will visit the Shi'ar. They are all incapable of convincing the alien empires to quit using the portal or stopping the war, and Lilandra even sends the Nega-Bomb (a weapon of mass destruction of intergalactic scale) to the Kree galaxy. She's eventually convinced to retrieve it and begin peace negotiations, but it's too late: the bomb had been stolen by Skrulls (who have an even greater feud with the Kree), who then set it off.
Back on the Falchion One, the Black Panther puts the tractor beam into operation while the other Avengers board the quinjet. An explosion rocks them free without the Black Panther, who informs Captain America that the damage has damaged the computers such that the tractor beam must be fired manually before it drifts into the sun and is destroyed.
The Avengers are Earth's Mightiest Heroes, the most valiant protectors that the planet has to offer, but there is one dark sin hiding in their past. During the first Kree/Shi'ar War, one team of Avengers broke their most sacred rule and committed cold-blood murder on an intergalactic scale.
Operation: Galactic Storm is a 1992 crossover that puts the Avengers in the middle of a bloody war between two great galactic empires, the Kree and the Shi'ar. Earth becomes involved because its space is used as a midway point for hyperspace travel by both factions, which has the side-effect of destabilizing the Sun to potentially disastrous outcomes. The Avengers divide into three teams: one goes to the Kree Empire, one to the Shi'ar, and one remains on Earth. Their initial attempts to stop the war, however, seem to be futile, as the Shi'ar acquire the Nega-Bands, a powerful Kree weapon used in the past by the hero Captain Marvel, and retrofit them to build a Nega-Bomb, a weapon of mass destruction of unthinkable power.
To make things worse, the Supreme Intelligence (which managed to secretly survive this ordeal) is not just a living creature. At the time it was also the rightful ruler of a recognized political entity. The Avengers committed political murder on an intergalactic scale, and this action was supposed to "haunt them for a long time," but this proved to not be the case. The internal strife caused by the split over the decision to kill the Supreme Intelligence was quickly overcome. The Avengers' actions during the first Kree/Shi'ar War were quickly forgotten, meaning that Earth's Mightiest Heroes never paid for their greatest crime.
First, I want to outline what these companies do and why their risk profiles are very different. Virgin Galactic is building a space tourism company, charging $400,000 or more for the privilege of flying into space for a short time. But it has yet to launch commercial operations, which you can see in its revenue and free-cash-flow numbers.
Virgin Galactic's market cap is $1.1 billion, and the company currently has $1.1 billion in cash on hand with no debt. But the problem is that the company is burning about $100 million per quarter in operations, which will likely continue until commercial operations get off the ground.
The downside for this company is zero, but I also think the upside is well over 5x, given its potential to generate $1 billion in revenue from a single spaceport. If Virgin Galactic gets commercial operations off the ground next year, it could start a decade-long growth phase for the company.
Virgin Galactic is a much higher-risk stock, but the company's valuation going up 5x or even 10x is plausible if it gets operations off the ground. That's not a guarantee, but management says commercial operations are "on track to launch" in Q2 2023, and next-generation spaceships that can carry six passengers are due to arrive in 2025. In the next five to 10 years, the stock could easily jump 5x if touring space becomes common.
Thousands of flight cancellations and delays coupled with long lines and missing luggage at airports frustrated U.S. travelers over the Christmas weekend after a massive winter storm snarled airport operations around the country.
Southwest Airlines said on Monday it was facing a large number of calls from customers inquiring about their travels and that it was "doing its best" to get its network back to normal after the storm. "My brothers Southwest Airlines flight out of Philly back to El Paso was canceled today and the best they could do was out of Baltimore on Tuesday morning! Nothing anyone could do but so much travel insanity," tweeted another Twitter user named Alex Gervasi.
Honolulu is rolling out a series of community meetings next week to begin future planning on the subject of protecting our oceans and managing our storm water runoff. We've seen the damage resulting from flash floods in recent years, bringing the challenge of drain capacity to the forefront as an issues the city faces. Department of Facility Management Director Ross Sasamura sat down with us yesterday afternoon to talk about a proposed idea to create a utility to help improve our storm water system and plan for the future.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO), a major NASA mission launched in 1999, continues to operate flawlessly. Two of its four scientific instruments were built at CSR, the High-Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometer (HETG) (Professor Canizares, Drs. Dewey, Flanagan, Schattenburg) and ACIS, a Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) imaging spectrometer (Drs. Ricker, Bautz, Baganoff, Ford, Grant, Kissel, Mayer, Prigozhin). CSR is also active in the Chandra X-ray Observatory Science Center (CXC), which oversees the operation of CXO (Professor C. Canizares, Drs. Allen, D. Davis, J. Davis, Houck, Huenemoerder, Marshall, Schulz, Wise).
Highlights of high resolution imaging with ACIS include discovery of a rapid, 3-hour, 50-fold X-ray outburst from our Galactic center, providing compelling evidence that the X-ray emission is coming from a supermassive black hole (Drs. Baganoff, Bautz, Ricker); studies of dark matter in clusters of galaxies, confirmation that very massive clusters exist at high redshifts, supporting a low matter-density universe, the first high-angular-resolution X-ray observations of a gravitationally lensed quasar (Drs. Arabadjis, Bautz, Machacek, Ms. Jeltema, Mr. Malm, Mr. Morgan, Professor. Canizares, Schechter); initial studies of the compact object discovered in the supernova remnant Cas A (Professor Chakrabarty); studies of the population of X-ray sources in globular clusters (Mr. Pooley, Professor Lewin), and studies of jets from active galactic nuclei (Dr. Marshall).
High resolution spectra obtained with HETG have been used to probe material around active galactic nuclei, including discovery of dust in the ionized clouds, set limits on the warm component of the intergalactic medium, probe relativistic outflow from a galactic microquasar and spectral features in other X-ray binaries, measure composition and physical conditions in stellar coronae, stellar flares, and winds from hot, young stars, and study the abundances and dynamics of young supernova remnants, and the atmospheres of neutron stars (Drs. Allen, D. Davis, Dewey, Fang, Flanagan, Houck, Huenemoerder, Lee, Marshall, Ogle, Schulz, Wise, Mr. Stage, Professor Canizares).
The orbiting Bruno B. Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), named in honor of the late MIT professor, is now in its sixth year of operations. The light curves of more than 100 X-ray sources from the All-Sky Monitor (ASM, built at CSR) provide a new global view of the nature of the variability of the X-ray sky. Observations of rapid periodic and aperiodic behavior from neutron stars and black holes with the large-area instrument continue probe the physics of these objects and the predictions of General Relativity (Professors H. Bradt, Chakrabarty, Lewin, Drs. Levine, E. Morgan, R. Remillard, Mr. Miller). 2ff7e9595c
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