Basically. it's just the International space station. which is so cool! it orbits earth from space and people live in it. It's the biggest human habitat off earth and its still under construction. whats not fucking awesome about that??
A couple of years ago, a 'space tourist' anousheh ansari, took a trip up and stayed on the station for 10 days. She recorded the whole experience on a blog, going into detail about all aspects of her journey, from the preparing for the launch to life on the satellite and coping with the earth again. She gives the impression of the space station being a peaceful, otherworldly haven manned lovingly by intelligent, friendly scientists, and frankly ive completely fallen in love with it..
Her blog is thoroughly reccommended by me, you can find it (well the good bits start) here. Annoyingly the first post is on the last page and everything, so you will have to work backwards- just remember to click 'previous' instead of 'next' ^^ Also the mission notes and video footage were added in realtime- not in sync with her entries- but you're all intelligent people, you'll work it out.
Anyway, theres a number of videos i think are really cool. ive tried to pool together the ones i think are good.
Anousheh's launch on the Russian Soyuz. The launch site is in Kazakhstan. During ascent you can hear the crew reporting from onboard in russian, which is being translated to english.
See the little orange thing dangling from the ceiling inside the capsule? One of the astronauts explains it's a toy bear called misha. Misha is being used as a G-Force Sensor.
You can see a tour of the outside station here. For an awesome tour inside, Cheerey flight engineer mike fincke takes you on a 3 part journey around the ship, complete with cheesey 80s music n all! nice one mike! unfortunately embedding is disabled, so i figured just click on mike's pic instead:
For Lazy ass people, episodes 2 and 3 are here.
There were some videos of ansari doing things like washing hair, eating with a spoon, etc, which were quite long and boring but interesting to see. every now and then you'd see a tiny ball of water flying off her hair when she washed it. unfortunately those vids have been removed now.. but if i find them again they will be added.
I just find it fascinating.. like, when you're spinning round, does it feel like you're spinning round, or the room is spinning around you? when you can't feel any up or down, what's realtive to what?
Btw, just in case you were wondering what exactly they do in space, here's a video:
They all seem to make little videos about daily life, like.. how to open a can of honey! wow.
I kinda love this little video, it really seems to convey just how bored and homesick the astronauts must start to get from time to time. basically, they've figured out a way of drinking liquid from an open container much like a cup. Much joy for them! You can tell by the speed of his voice and how many times he repeats 'you can SIP your coffee!! you dont have to SUCK!' just how excited by this they must be. So excited, in fact, that they felt the need to make a little video and tell mission control all about it. And you can see at the end just how much mission control shares their excitement.
presumeably before hand, they drank their tea like this!
And here's the feel good montage of space life!
Re-entry:
This is Ansari's re entry. The soyuz is composed of 3 parts, the descent module, orbital module and equipment module (carrying any waste from the ISS). They get jettisoned and burn up in the atmosphere as they fall with the descent module.
For people as fascinated by space flight as me, here's a full length launch-to-orbit of the Russian Soyuz and launch-to-orbit of the American Space Shuttle:
Soyuz:
Shuttle:
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