Only one chance in this lifetime…
Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him.
I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.
Cannot emphasize enough what percentage of messages in neighborhood mom chats are “does anyone have a spreadsheet of all the childcare places around here” - this is a small thing that’s a big service.
Christina Koch was a firefighter at the South Pole at -111°F before she ever applied to be an astronaut. That was maybe the fourth most interesting line on her resume. She grew up in North Carolina, got three degrees from NC State, and her first real job was building deep-space instruments at NASA.
Then she left for Antarctica. Spent three and a half years bouncing between the Arctic and Antarctic as a research scientist, including a full winter at the South Pole base. That means going months without sunlight or fresh food, with a crew of about 50 people and no way out until flights resume. While she was down there, she also joined the glacier search-and-rescue team.
After coming back, she went to Johns Hopkins and built instruments for two NASA missions (one of them is still orbiting Jupiter right now). She figured out how to start a tiny vacuum pump that NASA designed for a future Mars rover. Johns Hopkins nominated it for their Invention of the Year in 2009. Then she went back to the field. More time in Antarctica and a stretch up in Greenland. A government research station in northern Alaska, near the top of the world. Then she ran another one in American Samoa, near the equator.
In 2013, NASA selected her from 6,300 applicants. Eight people got in. Her first space mission was supposed to be a normal rotation on the International Space Station, but NASA extended it. She ended up staying 328 straight days and orbiting Earth 5,248 times, covering about 139 million miles (roughly 291 round trips to the Moon). Up there, she ran over 210 experiments, including tests of cancer drugs in zero gravity and 3D printers that can build structures close to human tissue. Six spacewalks, 42 hours floating outside the station. She learned Russian for the training. She flies supersonic jets.
Right now, Koch is on Artemis II, heading for a flyby behind the far side of the Moon. The crew launched on April 1 and is on track to travel about 252,000 miles from Earth, which would break the all-time human distance record of 248,655 miles set by Apollo 13 in 1970. That record has stood for 56 years, and it was set during a disaster that nearly killed the crew. Fred Haise, one of the Apollo 13 astronauts, is 92 now. He told Koch: "I heard you're going to break our record."
Nobody had left Earth's neighborhood since December 1972. Koch and her three crewmates are the first in 53 years, and they are coming home at about 25,000 mph. That is faster than any crewed spacecraft has ever come back through the atmosphere.
@moultano@Moms4Liberty Eye opening information, thanks! We will share it with our parents as iReady is a big controversy at LA Unified. Do you have any info if iReady exams/“diagnostic” have the same issues as the daily practice?
Exp 74 configured space biology and Earth imagery gear then measured crew heart, lung, and brain activity today. The station is also orbiting higher after a cargo spacecraft fired its engines. https://t.co/5Yx2KqPtXQ
B: ... The one most concerning to the team at present is [...] but on observed rate of progress since last update 6 weeks ago, at which 12 were yellow and 5 red, I feel very confident we will hit the date.
A: Put a number on very confident.
B: 95%.
A: If it slips, why does it.
"What would have accompanied an actual scheduling discussion?"
A: So are you going to hit the date.
B: Status rounds to green.
A: No really are you going to hit the date. What is the long pole?
B: We're tracking 37 subtasks, of which 30 are green, 5 yellow, and 2 red. ...
A lot of people are playing a character they don't enjoy, and they think they're stuck that way forever because switching characters would be out of character
Continuing to have AI build a weird game demo a day. Here is: "Make a game where you have to prevent the apocalypse, but the interface is just Jira tickets"
Pretty fun/funny branching storyline, all text is AI created with minor feedback from me. Play: https://t.co/Zr5OM7z3FN
Just finished our final insertion/closeout training with the crew prior to launch. It is finally sinking in how close we are to humanities return to the Moon. #MoonSoon
It’s just…. so beautiful.
If I was in Nashville I would be mapping out small infill parcels that might obtain variances due to these new capabilities.
-50% less large apparatus use, extending lifespan of v expensive equipment.
-faster urban responses for > life safety
-$$ savings for city
-more nimble small space fire & EMS response
GOD: With this terminal you have access to literally anything. You can change universal constants. Rewrite time. Traver--
ME: uv pip install numpy
GOD: What
ME: you gotta do it first
Theoretically if I were to disappear on a zeppelin for months or years, I would stack the galley with loads of sweetened condensed milk, canned oysters, and canned high vitamin C fruits. Hard to go too wrong with that.
you say you're "dedicated" to your startup
are you dedicated enough to spend 15 years training a shark to chew the undersea data cable of your biggest competitor?
or are you an armchair founder?