For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been slowly going through Discovery Channel’s TV series entitled When We Left Earth: The Nasa Missions, about the early beginnings of NASA and the race for space. I’m finally finished watching all of the episodes (I took my time) and my impression of it all is that it seems like a pretty thorough look at NASA’s struggle and triumphs on the way to the Moon and to the International Space Station. The amount of archive footage alone is more than enough reason to watch this documentary series and it’s pretty awesome to hear the whole story from the mouth of those who actually went up into space.
Nowadays, space travel seems like a pretty standard procedure, but after watching this series, I definitely have a greater appreciation of what it takes to get there and back. NASA really took great risks to further exploration and research, and their spirit of leaping blindly into space travel is worthy of such a beautifully produced documentary TV series.
When I first saw this photo on The Big Picture I seriously thought it was a set of pie charts on a spreadsheet. It turns out that it’s actually a bunch of roads and circular fields in Egypt.
It’s Earth Day today (didn’t you see the Google logo?), so enjoy NASA’s HD video of views of our beautiful planet from the International Space Station. According to NASA, the ISS travels at an approximate speed of 17,500 miles per hour, orbiting Earth every 90 minutes from an altitude of approximately 220 miles. Also interesting to note is that the ISS is big enough to see from Earth with the naked eye.
This is an example of a great song with a stupid music video.
I agree with Pigeons and Planes on this one: I wish that they would have just done a simple video with the artists singing and dancing around. Just about anything would have been better than this.
I’ve been following the development of the mega-collaboration between DJ’s Squeak E. Clean and DJ Zegon ever since it was made known that they were coming together with artists from around the world to form N.A.S.A.
It’s amazing that the two managed to get so many people on board this musical project. There are names like Kanye West, M.I.A., Santogold, The Cool Kids, DJ AM, Ghostface Killah, Tom Waits and many more on one 17-song disc. Of course, with such high-calibre names on queue, N.A.S.A. is setting some very high expectations to be met and they almost get it with the exception of a few tracks. Otherwise, I think the album is quite fun to listen to simply because you get to hear so many styles of lyrical flow in one sitting. Some of my favorite tracks are ”Gift”, “Samba Soul”, “The Mayor”, and “N.A.S.A. Music”.
If NASA development and research go as planned, future Space Shuttle missions could see the implementation of this powerful ejector seat that would propel astronauts far enough away from any danger of an exploding rocket.
According to WIRED, this new ejector seat can deliver half a million pounds of thrust which causes it to burn through more than half of its fuel in 3 seconds.
Judging by the video though, it looks like the act of ejecting from the Space Shuttle alone could be deadly for the astronauts as the sudden force could very well be many more times that of a standard Space Shuttle launch.
