Monday, October 25, 2021

To Boldly Go

OVERDUE: I have had this blog draft sitting in my draft folder for weeks now. "Blog post" is on the to do list every day, but it seems to get bumped every darn day.

This is not going to be my best blog post ever, but it's going to get me over the hump and out of the draft folder, and I hope to get back on track.

Nearly two weeks ago, we started our day by watching Captain James T. Kirk rocket to space. I never thought I'd get to say or see that in my lifetime.

Of course, it wasn't really the Star Trek legend Captain on the flight, it was actor William Shatner, who is synonymous with that role he made famous. 

https://youtu.be/uEhdlIor-do


While his crewmates (two space tourists who plunked down a quarter million apiece, and Audrey Powers, Blue Origin's vice president of mission and flight operations) did somersaults in micro gravity, Shatner was glued to the Blue Origin capsule's window.

The flight lasted just over 10 minutes, and reached a maximum altitude of nearly 66 miles (106 km), 4 miles higher than the widely recognized boundary of space.

"This was the voyage of the RSS First Step today," Blue Origin wrote in a Twitter video description. "Its mission: encounter Earth from incredible views at apogee."
https://publish.twitter.com/?hideConversation=on&query=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fblueorigin%2Fstatus%2F1448385762345488395&widget=Tweet

You can click on the link after the word apogee or this link to see the video from when they were experiencing micogravity - https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1448385762345488395?s=20 

Speaking of Blue Origin, they announced plans today to build their own space station. That's ambitious! Jeff Bezos' vision is  an orbiting mixed-use business park in space. 

MEANWHILE, AT NASA: More recently, we stumbled upon a time lapse video of the stacking of the Orion spacecraft on top of the fully assembled Space Launch System (SLS) rocket at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, on 21 October 2021, in preparation for the uncrewed Artemis I launch.

During the Artemis I mission, the European Service Module will take the spacecraft more than 64 000 km beyond the Moon in a test flight to demonstrate its capabilities. Can't wait to see that! The Artemis 1 uncrewed mission is targeting for liftoff in February of 2022 (rescheduled from November 2021). If all goes well, Artemis I will help pave the way for future crewed moon missions for the first time since 1972. It's been a long damn time since we were on the moon. I'll never forget watching those moon missions as a kid, and I hope CJ and Annabelle will have the same thrill before they're too much older.

You can read more about the Orion mission on the European Space Agency's page: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Orion



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