Tag Results: space
I've added a new link on the Blogroll to the right of these words...it gives you direct access to NASA TV, that little known TV station which offers live coverage of NASA missions. At the moment, you can see live film of Expedition 16 on board the International Space Station. I just spent a few valuable minutes which could have been spent doing something I get paid for doing watching the solar panel of the ISS slowly moving against the backdrop of the planet Earth.
I can't believe how much time I'm going to waste watching this. It's surreal to suddenly be catapulted out of Ordinary World into the world of space.
There was a wonderful episode of Heartbeat last year in which the 1960s characters gathered in the Aidensfield Arms to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon...and it was clear that the power of that moment lay in its extraordinary uniqueness.
Now, the moment is not unique; you can access it any time, day or night (though you have to check the schedules or take pot luck, because sometimes it's just archive or educational stuff) , just by clicking on the following words:
Commander Peggy Whitson is now aboard the International Space Station - we can see her in the photo above in one of her most glamorous and fetching space ensembles looking, um, like the robot from Lost in Space. That's her on the right.
The NASA website account of the changeover between Expeditions is as detailed and dry as always; the reality of life in space is endless grinding detail and routine. But of course the unexpected does sometimes happen. In Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's splendid novel Time's Eye, the crew of the ISS are jolted out of their usual routine when the Earth is subject to a massive time dislocation which causes Mission Control to vanish, and compels the crew of the ISS to make a hazardous landing without any assistance, only to find themselves confronted by the massed hordes of Genghis Khan's army.
It is, I reluctantly concede, very unlikely that Peggy and her gang will face a similar plight. (Although if they do, we won't know about it... We'll be the ones who are obliterated!) But in the real world, things are usually dull most of the time; that's why we read novels.
Still, it's reassuring to see the ordinary, workaday business of space going on...and I will in this blog keep popping in to see how Expedition 16 are faring.
All photographs reproduced by kind permission of NASA.
Dawn launching...photograph reproduced by kind permission of NASA.
It's getting even more cluttered up in space...before long, they'll need bus lanes.
The latest NASA mission features the unmanned spaceship Dawn which has just begun its journey to the asteroid belt, where it will explore Vesta and Ceres. Dawn is the size of a motorbike, but in space its wings will unfurl to create a magnificent Icarus. It is basically a flying camera, but after being launched by old fashioned booster rockets into orbit (see above photo - most of what is taking off is the Delta II rocket, not Dawn herself) Dawn will be propelled by a sophisticated ion drive.
This sent a shiver down my spine. In Debatable Space, Lena's space yacht has a back up ion drive engine. To be honest, as a science fiction writer with no science degree, I had only a smattering of a grasp of how such a spaceship engine would really operate. It just, er, kinda sounded good.
But now we know; and it's way cool.