Space Cadet

Today, two plaques inscribed with the nearly 60-year-old United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights will be launched into space from Kennedy Space Center aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor. The plaques, engraved in both French and English with the Declaration’s 30 articles, are sealed in “space-proof” packaging and are booked for permanent orbit around Earth from ESA’s Columbus multidisciplinary space laboratory in the European module International Space Station.

The Astronaut Farmer should have never taken off: the movie is a dud. Billy Bob Thorton plays the lead character, Charles Farmer, who was once an astronaut-in-training but never left Earth…instead, he was forced to leave his prestigious position after a mental break-down when his father committed suicide.

Last week, the TalkingScience team trekked out to Staten Island to put on a Science Cabaret for students at I.S. 34. We were accompanied by a bee keeper, a biologist, a 3D artist from Hollywood, a few flamenco dancers, and our L’Oreal-UNESCO award-winning emcee (“Cindy the Scientist”). Cindy is a great story-teller, and while she was researching the history and science behind flamenco dancing, she came across some an interesting bit of information about the Rio Tinto, a river in Spain and a region that was once populated by flamenco-dancing …

By Summer Ash

I didn’t expect to question my self-worth as an astronomer while watching the third Presidential debate last night, but that’s what happened.

Senator McCain’s relentless harping on Senator Obama for destroying “Joe the Plumber’s” American dream was just too much. Let me tell you about my American dream. It has to do with stars.

“In The Shadow of the Moon” is the best space documentary film I’ve ever seen. The former Apollo astronauts launch down memory lane, telling stories about a Texan lady who tried to sue them for reciting lines from the Bible on Christmas Eve while they were orbiting the Moon (on charges of their insensitivity of the separation between Church and State), laughing about how their lives changed after they got “the right stuff”, etc. Buzz Aldrin, being a frank and funny guy, even admits that the noticeable pause he took …

NOAA in Second Life
While most news services are covering crashing banks, bitter op-eds about bailouts, and general financial crisis, I thought I would pass along news about a company that is going up, rather than down: the Virgin Galactic, of course! VG just sent out a press release announcing that they will partner with The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to explore the use of VG’s vehicles to research climate change and other issues relevant to NOAA’s mission.

SpaceX
SpaceX, Stanford dropout Elon Musk’s company, made it to orbit on Sunday night! This marks the first privately developed launch vehicle to reach earth orbit from the ground. A new kind of space race is really taking off… no longer between countries, it’s now a race between capitalism’s most successful entrepreneurs.

When is the last time you were connected to your mother via a life-supporting cord, floated in lieu of walking, and thought it normal to urinate and defecate on yourself? If your answer is, “When I was living in embryonic fluid, in my mother’s belly” you’ve clearly never gone on a space walk (the connection to a mother is the “mother ship,” by the way).

It was a dark and starry night in Prospect Park at 10pm last Tuesday, and I decided that I was in the mood for a jog. Parks in Brooklyn are not always the safest places to spend time after the sun goes down, but I pay attention to my surroundings and stay along the edge of the park, so it’s not so bad (my mother disagrees).

“Around my artwork there is often the whiff of a science project,” Adrienne Klein declares in her Artist’s Statement. Indeed, Klein mixes a dose of science and a little something extra into the matrix of each of her pieces, including a dash of philosophy, a pinch of mathematics, and lots of innovation.