Getting the flavor of...

Virginia’s space rockets

Witnessing a rocket launch turns out to be a “bizarrely emotional” experience, said Melanie D.G. Kaplan in The Washington Post. That was the rediscovery a few fellow space nuts and I shared last month when we stood a couple miles from Virginia’s Wallops Flight Facility and watched a 13-story rocket blast off for a rendezvous with the International Space Station. If you’re keeping such a moment on your own bucket list, checking it off “just got a lot easier.” Wallops Island is located less than two hours from Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and recent upgrades have allowed it to line up several launches a year by the private firms now helping NASA run space missions. As Jan. 9’s countdown began, I didn’t know how I’d respond. But 10 seconds after the rocket lifted silently from its pad, the sound “hit me square in the chest.” Looking skyward as the rocket raced upward, I felt my eyes watering. “It wasn’t because of the wind.”

Greenville’s comeback

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Greenville, S.C., is becoming “a beacon of change for the new South,” said Joseph Hooper in Men’s Journal. Left for dead in the 1960s after its textile mills closed, this city of 60,000 owes much of its resurgence to the decision of Michelin and BMW to locate factories here, yet the “once-blighted” downtown “is now an attraction in itself.” Restaurants are the big draw, but you’ll want to poke around the 19th-century Mast General Store and follow the river walkway to the bridge that spans Reedy River Falls. The nearby Blue Ridge Mountains and “rolling Piedmont hills” have helped make Greenville a mecca for outdoor sports, while the Baptist school Bob Jones University gives the city a significant claim to fame in art circles. The Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery, which holds important works by Rubens and Van Dyck, purports to harbor the largest collection of religious art outside the Vatican.