As I type this we are about  1hrs 25mins from the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-125 to service the Hubble Space Telescope.  The launch is due at  7:01pm our time today (Monday).

This is one of the very rare times, and possibly the last ever time we will see two shuttles rolled out onto the pads at the same time.   Why?

After the Columbia accident, where the shuttle broke apart and burnt up during re-entry, it’s Nasa policy that any mission must have a safe haven, where the Crew can move to should the shuttle be found to be damaged and unable to cope with re-entry.  Usually this is the International space station, but we aren’t going there on this mission, we are going to the Hubble, so the Atlantis will be all alone out there.  This is why Endeavour is sat their waiting, It’s a life boat in case anything goes wrong.

This could be the final flight of Space Shuttle Atlantis, it is due to be decommissioned after this flight. Atlantis has completed 29 flights, spent 220.40-days in space, completed 3,468 orbits, and flown 89,908,732 nautical miles (166,510,972 km) in total, as of September 2006. Among the five Space Shuttles flown in space, Atlantis has conducted a subsequent mission in the shortest time after the previous mission when it launched in November, 1985, only 50 days after its previous mission (from Wikipedia).  However, the Ares (big Saturn 5 like rocket – due to replace the Shuttles in 2012) test flights due to take place this year have been postponed due to “budget reviews” so the old shuttles may still have some life and a few more missions left in them yet.  (there are major parts of the shuttle Atlantis flying today that we rated for a 10 year life span, which are now 22 years old!)

Good luck Atlantis!

You can watch the flight live on Nasa TV or if you want higher quality streams you can try the links on my blog.

About the Hubble space telescope.

The shuttle fleet aren’t the only ones feeling their age.  The Hubble space telescope was launched in April 1990, nearly 20 years ago.  It was hugely expensive and very ambitious.  The launch was successful, but when it was turned on and pointed at the stars for the first time, it was found that everything was blurred and out of focus.  Considering the mission costs, this was a stunning disaster.

Fortunately, the Hubble was designed to be repaired and upgraded in space, so a mission was put together to fit corrective optics and since then the HST has been responsible for some of the most important space based science ever done, despite its huge cost, it has earned its money many times over.

Over the next 11 days there will be five back to back space walks to replace instruments and refill the propellant tanks, there will even be some work done on circuit board level which has never been attempted before.  Atlantis is due to land on the 22nd (a week on Friday) at about 15:41.

You can be amazed by the science Hubble has done, you can be shocked at the cost of the operation and maintenance, but it’s the outstanding beauty of its images and its ability to connect us to the universe that which will be its long lasting legacy.

Last night (17th March 2009) I was able to capture a few photos of the ISS and Discovery very close to docking. The combination of circumstance that has to fall into place is stagering, firstly, there has to be a shuttle about to dock, and that doesn’t exactly happen every week. Next, the orbit of the IIS and shuttle has to be favorable so that the orbital ground track pass will near enough my house to be able to see it, this is not so tricky, pretty much anywhere over Westen Europe will do.  However, timing is critical, it must be just in that sweet spot of dusk where the sun will still reflect off the space craft, but it’s dark enough at home that you can take a fairly long exposure without it being blown out.  Finaly, it has to be clear; a cloudy night would ruin it.  As you can see below, the clouds nearly did. I’m pleased with this shot, but if you want to see a better one check out Marco Langbroek’s blog

Wow, it’s been a long time since I posted anything here, but there hasn’t been much space action recently to write about.  As a catch up here are some of the things I should have blogged about, but didn’t get round to!

On February 10th, at 4:56pm,  Two satellites in earth orbit  were destroyed in the first ever satellite collision in  space 500 miles above the Taymyr Peninsula in Siberia.  The relative speed of the impact was 26,170mph! The satellites involved were a live and fully functional “Iridium 33” (part of the Iridium satellite phone network that you may have seen the comic relief climbers using on Kilimanjaro) and a defunct Russian Kosmos 2251 communications satellite which had been dead since 1995. This collision has created a huge debris cloud in space.  The effect of this debris is really scary, perhaps leading to something called the “Kessler Syndrome” where the debris from this collision collides with other satellites, and that debris then collides with more satellites and before you know it (in a process called Ablation cascade) earth orbit is full of razor sharp bits of metal flying around randomly at 10,000+ miles per hour making being in space even more dangerous than it is now. (You can see a great diagram of this, here, via APOD)

Earlier this month, on the 6th march, a new space telescope was launched called Kepler. Read more about it here.  It’s main job is to SEARCH FOR EXTRASOLAR PLANETS! How cool is that?  It’s not a direct replacement for the ageing hubble ‘scope but it will be ‘complementary’.  There is a shuttle mission scheduled to repair hubble soon, more details on that below. The mission will last for 3.5 years and aims to discover and catalogue planets within the ‘habitable zones’ around nearby stars.

In dramatic news, the International space station was evacuated last Thursday (12th March) for fear that it was about to be hit by space debris.  Although not connected to the satellite collision mentioned above, it’s still a sign that this issue of debris is being taken seriously.  The debris passed by eventually and life on the station went on as usual, but it was really interesting to see how the news spread almost as fast as it can via twitter. Normaly, the ISS ground crew actually move the station out of the way of debris by boosting it’s orbit, but in this case they didn’t have time.  The crew closed all the interior hatches and took refuge in the Russian Soyuz escape capsule. Upadate: This has just happend again, on monday!

The main news is that last night (Sunday March 15^th), Space shuttle Discovery launched just before midnight on mission STS-119 to the international space station. You can watch the launch in glorious HD here (also watch this HD video taken from a guys back yard 40 miles away!!!!).  The aim of this mission is to fit out a new set of solar panels and a truss section to the ISS.  Should be some hot spacewalking action over the next 14 days so stay tuned.

From Wikipedia:STS-119 will deliver the S6 solar arrays to the space station, completing the construction of the Integrated Truss Structure.[8] STS-119 will be used for several experiments, including Shuttle Ionospheric Modification with Pulsed Local EXhaust (SIMPLEX), Shuttle Exhaust Ion Turbulence Experiments (SEITE), and Maui Analysis of Upper Atmospheric Injections (MAUI). STS-119 will also be used for the “Boundary Layer Transition Detailed Test Objective” experiment. One tile in the thermal protection system will be raised 0.25 inches (6.4 mm) above the others so that, at about Mach 15 during reentry, a boundary layer transition will be initiated.

I recently bought myself a really cheep “fish-eye” converter for my camera from eBay, and surprisingly it’s not half as bad as I was expecting it to be. Yes it’s blurry round the edges and looks about as far from anything professional as you could get, but it did only cost five pounds.  It would have been rude not to!  Anyway, it is a .45 multiplier which on my 18-55mm kit lens, at the 18 end of the tube makes the effective focal distance 8mm ish.. I’m not going to get anything as wide as that until I get round to buying the sigma 10-20 (and then it’s 2mm longer, but sooo much nicer looking with it)

It’s been really cloudy here, and when it is clear, it just doesn’t get dark, I guess that’s the english summer for you.  I did manage to take a couple of shots of the ISS on consecutive nights, although tonight i was really aiming for the Early Ammonia Servicer which i think I saw, but in a totally unexpected part of the sky.  I’ll get it next time…

Last night I snapped Lacrosse 5 as it made its way over my house.  Lacrosse 5 is one of the US military classified Spy Satellites (or DarkSats if you are feeling dramatic).  I wanted to get one long exposure with it arcing across the full frame, but a series of screw-ups meant I got three different pics.  While I was watching it, I did wonder what it was watching as it sailed across my back garden (probably not much seeing as it was night… )

It looks like STS-124 launched without incident, no damage or issues being reported. It’s a shame the same can’t be said for Launch pad 39a at KSC which pretty much got blown apart (ok that’s a bit of an exaggeration) when Discovery took off. 

Those are pieces of pad 39a splashing into the water below Disco’s Plume

I snapped this a few nights ago (5/6/2008 00:01:55hrs 48sec exposure).  It’s a quite amazing flare from a NOSS Pair (3-4 I think).  It was purely by chance that I saw them rising fast in the southwest and I hit the shutter on the cam about half way through the flare.  As you can see, I didn’t really think about focus, this was taken with the Kit 18-55 lens on my D40x and it will loose focus if you even look at the lens funny.  There has been some heavy post pro on this image in photoshop to loose the light pollution and bring out as much sharpness as I can.

STS-124 is underway following the successful launch of Discovery on Saturday night.  The main element of the mission is the installation of the second part of the Japanese Kibo research lab, although i suspect of more pressing importance to the crew will be the replacement pump for the toilet.  I hate to think how the ISS must smell, I remember the MIR has its own musty mouldy smell, along with a fruit fly infestation. But that’s another story.

There were rumours all day that the MRO HiRise camera had another great image on it’s way back to us on planet Earth.  Here it is, superb clarity, all the elements of the mission (minus the crew stage which probably burnt up) are in this shot.  

The Phoenix mission seems to be shifting focus away from pure science, and back to humanity. It’s like the late great Carl Sagan has touched this mission from the beyond (he’d love that idea!) Not only did we have the amazing photo of Phoenix’s EDL (which provokes in me the same silent awe, feelings of loneliness, and immense pride that I get from the Pale Blue Dot image and the Apollo Earthrise) but there is also the whole “Visions of Mars” project.

Essentially, the Planetary Society made a special one-off DVD out of silica glass, which is designed to last hundreds or even a thousand years. It contains messages from Carl Sagan, Arthur C Clarke and others along with thousands of names submitted to the Planetary society’s website. One day, and I think before too long, that disk will be retrieved and played. You can only guess at who will be reading it, but to mount an expedition to retrieve it, they will most likely be permanent residents.

I think that I missed a trick personally, as I don’t think I entered my name. I remember reading about it and thinking it was a good idea, but did I get round to it? I don’t know.

What worries me more is that I think the Planetary Society missed a trick too, if I had a chance to send a DVD into space where I knew it would be safe for a thousand years, I would try and cram as much human knowledge onto it as I could. I don’t trust this planet to be around long enough for us to keep our own history and knowledge safe (I still worry about the destruction of the Library of Alexandra).

Living in the UK, I don’t have easy access to NASA TV except through the on-line web streams. You can view NASA TV directly from the NASA website, but if you look around you can find better quality stream out there. You could try this one which is a blistering 1200kbps, which is too fast for my domestic net connection or this one at a more modest 500kbps.

Update (16.10.08): I’ve just tried both these streams and they still appear to be live! Clicking on the link doesn’t always work, I have to “copy link” and then paste it into the “open URL” menu in windows media player. If you know of any other streams, please post them in the comments!

Spacefans, Just take a moment here to look at the picture above and be still in contemplation.

This digital image was taken by the HiRISE camera (the most powerful camera ever flown in space (except for the HS telescope)) on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, in orbit around Mars. As I’m sure you’ve worked out, In it’s sights is Phoenix, on it’s parachute descending towards the Martian surface.

“Never, ever forget: we did this. This is what we can do.”

So it’s old news by now. Every cable news channel has been looping the footage because it’s been a slow news weekend. Phoenix landed, it was great, it worked, it sent back pictures.

Same
old
mars.

I couldn’t help feeling a pang of nostalgia for the MER EDLs. The phoenix EDL was sharp, focused and professional, but it didn’t have any of that Wayne Lee flair or the Steve Squyres coolness. I hope they bring back the old team for the MSL Mission.

The cold light of dawn has broken over the Nasa press release.  They claim they have found a supernova, younger than any other…

However,  think I’ve cracked it.  The original release is here,  but after studying it for a long time with a magnifying glass I can confidently announce that it is written in a very clever and sophisticated code.  To decipher the code, one only has to replace the words “youngest” with “Largest” and “Supernova” with “Mothership”.  As you can see, it now makes perfect sense.  They are obviously discussing the outcome of a giant space battle.

The largest  mothership in our galaxy has been discovered by tracking the rapid expansion of its remains. This result, using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array, will help improve our understanding of how often motherships explode in the Milky Way galaxy.

The tracking of this object began in 1985, when astronomers, led by Green, used the Very Large Array to identify the remnant of a mothership explosion near the center of our galaxy. Based on its Giant size, it was thought to have resulted from a mothership that exploded about 400 to 1000 years ago.

Twenty-two years later, Chandra observations revealed the remnant had expanded by a surprisingly large amount, about 16 percent, since 1985. This indicates the mothership remnant is much larger than previously thought.

Besides being the record holder for largest mothership, the object is of considerable interest for other reasons. The high expansion velocities and extreme particle energies that have been generated are unprecedented and should stimulate deeper studies of the object with Chandra and the Very Large Array.

NASA to Announce Success of Long Galactic Hunt

WASHINGTON — NASA has scheduled a media teleconference Wednesday, May 14, at 1 p.m. EDT, to announce the discovery of an object in our Galaxy astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years. This finding was made by combining data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory with ground-based observations.

So that’s 6pm our time. There is live audio on the net of the conference, and a pre-recorded Video file will air on nasa tv (although no time given)

I doubt it is that earth shattering, otherwise news would have leaked by now. Nasa is celebrating it’s 50 years as an institution this year so there will probably be something dry and dull like “the next 50 years of nasa”.

But.. seeing as the pope has said it’s ok to Love aliens (or something like that) and the UK government has admitted that it’s run by Aliens (sort of), maybe, just maybe it’s something more exciting.

(thanks to Unfriendly Ghost for pointing this one out!)

(It makes more sense if you were thinking of Beck’s – Where it’s At (”I got Two turntables and a Microphone”) when you read it)

I had the best night yet for Sat Obs last night, despite it being hazy and the ridiculous amounts of light pollution from living so close to London. I managed to score 5 naked eye sats, four of which I was able to identify, and none of which were anything obvious like the ISS. It constantly amazes me that I can get ~3.4 mag sightings out of my back garden, you should see the raw images that I get from the camera; bright orange!

Speaking of images out of the camera, I used my new remote to break through the 30sec Bulb barrier and did a few 1 Min+ exposures. For the final shot of the night I was aiming for Cosmos 2263 and opened the shutter with a 50mm lens attached, I visually picked up the satellite a few seconds later but bugger me if it wasn’t going the wrong way across the sky. Turns out that in a moment of serendipity, I had clocked Cosmos 1154 instead. Huh those crazy satellites!

The real buzz came when I found my original target Cosmos 2263 setting in the east, it’s path meant that the Camera shot that caught C.1154 probably caught C.2263 as well.

After some heavy duty PostPro in Photoshop to remove most of the light pollution, I had an image I’m proud of. In a geeky sort of way.

So it’s been a bumpy ride for some recently. The first south Korean astronaut was very nearly an ex-Korean astronaut on Saturday when the Soyuz earth return vehicle that she and fellow astronautess Peggy Whitson along with Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko narrowly avoided “lithobraking” (slowing down only when you leave a smoking crater in the ground).

The (slightly pale looking) Korean Astonaut, Yi So-Yeon, told a press conference in Russia’s Star City today: “During the descent there was some kind of fire outside the Soyuz capsule because we were going through the atmosphee. At first I was scared, but the two other guys looked okay, so I tried to look okay, too.”

The soyuz landed nearly 300 miles off course and 20 mins late due to a systems failure on board. The failure meant that the capsule returned to earth on a ballistic trajectory, rather than its normal computer controlled descent. (The word ballistic means to fall under the power of gravity) The difference between the two types of landing are 2-3 Gs Max for a normal descent compared with about 8-10Gs for a Ballistic entry.

Just to round off a bad day, the retro rockets that fire moments before touch down to slow the capsule right down for a soft landing also failed. Good job the parachutes were working. Apparently this isn’t the first time it’s happened it’s quite a common occurrence for the good old Soyuz (old being the emphasised word there). Apparently there are backup computer systems on board, one of which, I shit ye not, is noted down in the Soyuz flight manual as your brain. The amazing thing is that the Soyuz is actually built to withstand these types of landing, even without the retro rockets.
It’s a classic Soviet design philosophy: when quality and precision are unavailable, substitute brute strength.

Russian take on it – http://www.kommersant.com/p884947/Soyuz_TMA/

BBC news story – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7355912.stm

You may remember that ESA recently launched it’s new Space Truck, the ATV, AKA Joules Verne. It’s now docked to the ISS. What they were keeping quite is (I don’t know why, possibly not to worry the Americans or Russians) is that it and it’s Ariane-V is now human-flight rated.

By far the most exciting thing on the space geek radar is the landing of the Mars Phoenix Lander Mission which is due to land (fingers crossed) in 34 days, 8 hours and 48 minutes from now (not that I’m counting or anything). It’s a stationary lander like the old Viking probes (rather than golf buggy like rovers, spirit and opportunity). It’s landing in the polar regions with the primary goals of looking for water ice and microbial life. Rather alarmingly, they are ditching the whole bouncing airbag landing thing that spirit and opportunity used (and worked so perfectly) in favour of retro rockets and luck of the gods. Lets just hope they didn’t buy the retros from the same dodgy supplier that the Russians did for Soyuz. If they did, I guess there is always a backup plan of “regolithobraking” hahahaha (sorry – bad geology geek joke)

Nasa (JPL) mission home page – http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/mission.php

What does it say about life when all the visionary’s have died? Carl Sagen, Douglas Adams and now Arthur. Hang in there Patrick

It’s going to be a busy month for us space fans. At 0403GMT on Saturday 8th, the new ATV, Jules Verne (a bus sized cargo transfer vehicle for the ISS) built by ESA will launch. It will chase the station for a week and then park it’s self nearby and wait for the shuttle to arrive.
Endeavour is due to launch on March 11th on a 16 day mission. Reading between the lines, I’m guessing part of the mission will be either to monitor the docking of the new ATV with the Station to check that it’s working as expected, or to rescue the crew when the ATV ploughs into it. Not that I’m being pessimistic, but have you seen how the Europeans drive?

The main bulk of the sts-123 mission will be the installation of the new Japanese Lab, (Kibō), and the Canadian Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator (SPDM) (which sounds to me like something you could have some fun with). Looks like it could be a night launch, the current blast off is scheduled for 6.28am UTC

Thanks go to Paul for giving me a heads up on the LRO, a new mission to the moon. The Lunar Reconnaissance Obiter will be notable for many things, but my guess will be that it will remembered for being the first mission able to image the Apollo landing sites (for sure this time), and therefore put a final nail in the conspiracy theorists coffin. (Of course, the more stupid among them will be inclined to call this mission a fake too).
LRO will launch later in the year, Oct 28th. It is to be ‘co-manifested’ with The Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) which follows the proud NASA tradition of smacking expensive hardware into the face of the moon and superbly terminal speeds. This time, given clear skies, we should be able to see the cloud of ejecta and the flash from here on earth.


Last August (4th 2007) a mission to mars called Phoenix launched, and it is scheduled to land on May 25th in the Polar Regions. We haven’t had much mars action recently so this should be fun. NASA is already changing the orbits of MRO and MOO and ESA are doing likewise with MEO (that’s the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey Orbiter and Mars Express Orbiter respectively) so that they can all watch Phoenix’s EDL (Entry, Descent and Landing). You’ve got to love all these TLAs.

It’s probably old news by now but Burt Rutan has been recovering from open heart surgery. He seems to be on the mend now and has returned to his duties as head dude in charge of making Space Ship 2 fly.

So lots of stuff happened while I was away at GDC, and I didn’t get time to blog about it. Firstly, the most boring space shuttle mission in recent history landed, gasp, safely. However, we won’t be waiting long for the next one, Endeavour on STS-123 is already out at the pad and due to launch on March 11th (6.28am!). It’s going to be a long mission, 16 days, with the main focus the installation of the Japanese Experiment Module (Kibō).

Of course, the main news is that the US decided to shoot down USA 193, which was also a bit of a shame, it would have been much more exciting to watch it crash and burn. The announcement that they would shoot it down led to all sorts of predictable conspiracy outbursts and ranting about how it was all a big cover story for US ASAT tests. I’m sure the US did want to shoot it down to prove to china that they can shoot satellites down as well, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t do it before or actually planned this, it was all just opportunity. I was in my hotel room reading up on SeeSat-L when I discovered the news about the impending shoot down, due at about 10:30pm (iirc) that night. I suddenly felt quite vulnerable sitting there in a big US city. If they miss, or otherwise screw up, there could be some very, very, angry countries out there. Perhaps I’ve been watching too much Jericho.

So it’s all over and we’re home and mostly cleared of the jetlag. Overall it was a busy show, the effect of E3 dying is obvious to see, GDC is now as much about business development as it is about games development. I actually found it a bit frustrating to get around simply due to the number of people present. And I didn’t get a T-shirt.

I can’t believe I’m going to say it but… I think the iPhone is going to be a great gaming device. Damm Apple and all their ultra popular design. I was turned off touch screen by a generation of weak underpowered devices who didn’t have enough processor grunt to refresh the touch and update the screen, let alone run any games, but then I saw the LG Viewty. At last there was a touch screen device that responded to a touch with out having to wait a week for anything to happen. Nearly. Then I relented and allowed myself to be in the same room as an apple device for a short time, and found that I was deeply impressed. The screen is huge, both in resolution and real estate and the touch is so responsive, it almost feels predictive. The motion sensor works and the multi touch pinch is fun. This could be a great gaming platform. I’ve never been at a show where there was more anticipation for one technology release, namely the official iPhone SDK (now delayed untill march).

The main event also had it’s moments. I have been thinking a lot about PS3 Home, and I can’t help thinking that it’s not going to be a mediocre so-so. It will either be the most laughable attempt at community ever or a brilliant success. My game of the show was Chat Noir which I thought was perfect in every way. The experimental gameplay sessions, was terribly disappointing except for a few notable highlights, namely Ricky showing off Bernie, which was brilliant and a preview of the awesome Crayon Physics Deluxe. Where was the indie game jam? The whole event seemed to be lacking the energy of previous years, it was the first time in 6 years that I’ve seen empty seats in that room.

It rained a lot too.

After waiting for ages, STS-122 finally launched last night, it was one of the few launches recently I’ve not been around to watch on nasa TV. It all looks like it went smoothly, except for the usual foam breakup. The sensor glitches in that had kept the launch date on hold appear to have been fixed. “We won’t have the ECO sensor problem again. We’ve licked it,” [nasa administrator] Griffin told SPACE.com.

I just hope that ‘lick’ a metaphor…

In other news, your friend and mine, Mr. Burt Rutan and his team at SC are getting ready for a test flight of SpaceShip Two sometime ‘towards the middle of the year’ It will be flying from the worlds first space port (unless you count Star City in Russia, but that is military I suppose) which is going to be in the Mojave desert, and designed by Norman Foster’s bunch. I’ve seen it written that “The world first private spaceport will be designed to relate to the dimensions of the spacecraft and blend with its desert surroundings with a combination of geo-thermal, solar and wind power used to create a very low carbon footprint.” Which is handy considering the huge amount of stuff thrown out of the back of SS2’s rocket motor as it blasts it’s way into space (or the stratosphere at least). I think that the renaming of VSS Voyager to VSS Spirit of Steve Fossett is a brilliant move and I’m hoping that one of the three as yet unnamed VSS craft will be named after Carl Sagan.

I love it when people are inspired to really think differently about games and how to use games hardware. Is it just me or are we seeing something of the future in this video?

From the times…

Despite the outlandish predictions of some internet pundits, the future of humanity was never at risk today. But scientists were hoping to use the fly-past to work out how best to defend the planet against asteroids in the future.

As I mentioned in a post yesterday, the sat known to us as USA-193 has come to the attention of the worlds press as a threat to all life on earth, when, complete with it’s multi-megaton thermo nuclear power source, it hurtles back into the earth’s atmosphere from whence it once came, to wipe either London, New York, Paris, Sydney (or all of them) off the map. As is usually the case, the official sources are saying nothing, the press (and me) are just making stuff up, the only people with any clue what’s going on are the amateurs. To understand the real story of USA-193 and follow it’s progress, the best place to look is the SeeSat List. One of the seesat posters Dr. Marco Langbroek from Holland has a great blog that explains it all in detail.

USA-193 – Image by John Locker from the SeeSat List

why couldn’t i have had this when i was at uni? this would take me three weeks to do what this software allows you to do in realtime. Bastards.

Considering this will be a blog about my work with mobile games and games design in general, and quite possibly a vent for all my enthusiasm for anything space-like, a more appropriate banner was needed.

Howdy Space fans!

The date for the rescheduled STS-122 Atlantis mission has been announced. Unfortunately it’s outside of our working hours, but should be fun anyway. You can watch it at home if you are geek enough, http://www.nasa.gov

In other news, a huge bus sized US military satellite is due to crash land somewhere on earth soon. Should be a lot of fun. Check out the news stories Here and Here – hysterical stuff!

For more fun links to “when space things go bad” give these two clips a spin, both are of the same event, the launch of a US Delta 2 rocket back in ‘97 carrying a military GPS sat. I hope the crew of the soon to launch STS-122 don’t watch this!

at long last i’ve given the blog a bit of a face lift in preparation of getting typing. the picture of a the bulb is one of mine that i took a couple of years ago at a working electric generating waterwheel. the bulb had these huge amber glowing filaments that made it look like it came right from the Victorian era. how it survived that long I’ve no idea.