Dedicated to the Health and Safety of the Personal Space Traveler




Friday, December 10, 2010

Who Knew? A Lot of People According to Neil

[Hi, I am Leigh Ervine.  I am a friend of Eleanor's, a self-professed computer geek, and a long time follower/supporter of Exploring Space.  Every now and then I will post something here at SMA.  If you like it, let me know.  If you don't, let me know.  And now for the post.]

I was reading through tweets on my twitter account this morning and came across something from NPR you don't see every day.  Neil Armstrong responding to a blog posting about Apollo 11.

Robert Krulwich posted about how far Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin traveled away from the Lunar Module during their less than three hour excursion.  Robert was posting about a site (you can find a link in his post) that allows you to map things like lunar landing sites over things like a soccer field or your neighborhood.  (Cool stuff for a geek like me.)  I wasn't surprised that the distance traveled was so small.  What was surprising was the usually quiet Neil Armstrong responded.

You can read the original post with the geeky tool here.

Or you can just skip to the post with the Neil Armstrong response here.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Dragon Launched

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11948329

The Dragon ship was launched from Florida on a Falcon 9 rocket, with the aim of entering a circular orbit some 300km above the planet. After completing a number of manoeuvres in space, the capsule will then target a splashdown in the Pacific.

Dragon and Falcon 9 are both products of California's SpaceX company. It has a $1.6bn (£1bn) contract with the US space agency (Nasa) to provide 12 spacecraft with cargo capacity of at least 20 tonnes to resupply the International Space Station (ISS) through to 2016.