In Leroy Chiao’s five-day stint as astronaut guest blogger, he’s striving to illuminate the everyday aspects of life aboard the International Space Station, stuff that isn’t in press releases. Today’s topic? The air they breathe.
Across the Space Frontier is one of the most beautiful—if wildly inaccurate—books on space travel, mostly American space-race propaganda. Here are cutaways of the space station and rocket promised to be active by 1970.
In the summer of 1986, I spent a week at Space Camp in Huntsville, AL. Not only that, but in our final mission, I crashed our Space Shuttle.
Supplies of NASA’s go-to fuel for space exploration, plutonium-238, are dwindling. The U.S. stopped making it 20 years ago and now NASA’s Russian suppliers are running out after production shut down.
On April 12, 1961, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin stepped into his Vostok 1 spacecraft, started the pre-flight checks, and waited for countdown. Hours later, he muttered one of the most beautiful, yet obvious phrases in history:
The Stephen Colbert treadmill looks tiny, but there isn’t a lot of space to go around up there on the ISS. How does this work?
Wanna see where astroblogger Leroy Chiao spent over half a year? Check out NASA’s brand-new ISS Photosynth virtual tour (requires Silverlight). [NASA Photosynth Collection]
Computer! Yes captain? Place all 172 Star Trek Voyager episodes onscreen. Voyager? Yes. Not TNG? No, not TNG. You’re sure not TNG? I said Voyager, dammit. And play them back at 14x speed! …OK
Our astronaut guest blogger Leroy Chiao is one of the few spacemen to have flown in both a US Space Shuttle and Russia’s five-decade-old spacecraft, the Soyuz—any guess which one he prefers?
