Would you go to outer space?
I was reading BBC’s website today (because I don’t trust getting my news from the communist news network) I ran across an article about today’s launch. Not only is Endeavour bringing the new Leonardo module to double the living space on the space station, they are also bring a water regeneration system. This new system distils, filters, ionizes and oxidizes wastewater into fresh water for drinking. So basically the astronauts are recycling their piss into drinking water, which after all the reverse osmosis is perfectly safe it reminds me of my two favorite questions I get about working at NASA.
Whenever I meet someone new they always ask me the same questions:
1. What do I do at NASA and 2. Would I ever want to be astronaut/go into space. I just combine those questions together because I think they are essentially the same thing. I will answer the first question when I have more time and you can check out my portfolio for a more formal answer. So this brings me to my second question, would I ever want to go to space? From all my experience working here he answer is simple. I most definitely would not want to fly in space. Don’t get me wrong it would be awesome to experience living on the moon and mars for a few days, maybe a few weeks but I would miss everybody I knew back home on earth. Not to mention you would barely have any leisure time. You would constantly be checking and rechecking all the equipment making sure everything is working correctly (life support, guidance, propulsion). The food would always be room temperature because there is no refrigerator and no microwave. It is super noisy with all the computers and machines running and above all you have a water shortage. Now I think that if I had to I could get over drinking my own pee to survive. But now I ask you… would you be able to drink someone else’s pee? They say that you can taste of smell anything but I’m sure it’s still hard to swallow knowing where this water came from.
They found an Indian on the moon
In case you haven’t heard, India’s probe Chandrayaan 1 landed on the lunar surface this morning. Most of my coworkers think that this is a statement for India as India is trying to prove itself as a global power. That’s funny because most Americans still think of India as a desert with people riding around on camels. Honestly this lunar probe wasn’t really a big surprise to me. There are so many Indian engineers at Johnson Space Center already; hell my NASA manager is Indian.
I remember when I was at A&M I saw students from India all over the engineering buildings. If you own a Dell computer and you have to call customer support, there is like a 99% chance that there will be an Indian on the other end trying to help you fix your computer. This is just another example of how the rest of the world is catching up or even passing the US as a powerhouse.
Anyways… I was curious what the hell this probe was going to do on the moon. I did a little bit of research and basically for the next two years, Chandrayaan 1 will map a three-dimensional atlas of the Moon and also check for the presence of water-ice with the help of instruments built by India and other countries including the US, Britain and Germany.
I can’t image China being very happy about India beating them to the moon, because I know China had their eyes set on the moon a long time ago. I’m curious to see how China will respond with a probe/rover of their own.
Hopefully as other nations such as China and India set their sights on the moon Americans will kick NASA’s ass into getting us back on the moon again.
Did you know Mexico had a space agency?
I went to an all hands meeting at work last week and my manager was giving the up the quarterly pep talk about how well we are doing on the contract and some updates with the company by telling us that the company is expanding which is always good because there’s more opportunities within the company. Then she tells us that we are going international. We are opening up an office in Mexico because apparently Mexico is starting up a space agency (AEXA), who knew?
So this got me wondering what other countries had a space program that I wasn’t aware of… I knew the major international partners like Russia (RKA), the European Space Agency (ESA), Canada (CSA) and who can forget the Taikonauts from Japan (JAXA). The newest ones that I knew were coming into their own have been China (CNSA) and India (ISRO) because they have been in the news lately. I did a little bit of research and discovered that Bangladesh had a space program. To see the complete list check it out here.