Way to go Three News: at around 6:20, during a story on Discovery's imminent return to Earth, they mentioned that the shuttle would be passing over New Zealand at around 6:22, moving from the west to the south. A longer warning would have been nice...
Yes, I dashed outside. And for once, it wasn't cloudy, and I actually got to see it: a fairly bright star, not twinkling, moving steadily across the heavens. I've watched for satellites before, and made sure to catch a glimpse of Mir before it burned, but this is the first time in a long while that I've seen anything with people in it. Of course, I couldn't resist wondering whether they were looking back, but given that this is their second to last pass before reentry, they were almost certainly making sure everything was strapped down and that they were all lined up and pointed at Florida.
Discovery is scheduled to land at 8:46 GMT. Hopefully, it will all go well, and this won't be the last time I see it.
actually it will be landing a couple of hours later at the earliest (weather issues in Florida.
ReplyDeleteI saw it, and the space station, the night before - TVNZ is actually broadcasting the Nasa channel at the moment on the FreeTV satellite service (On OptusB the same satellite you get Sky from) as an experiment so you can tell when it's aboujt to pass over
...spam in a can...I really hoped by Twenty O Five we'd be hauling ass into space without the HUGE gas donkey...but I guess that's what you get when Space is a side-show for a war that isn't about the donkey, mmmkay.
ReplyDeleteOoooo... the temptation to wave would have been to great for me, even though I know they wouldn't have seen it. And the landing has been waved over 'til tomorrow due to weather.
ReplyDeletebut I guess that's what you get when Space is a side-show for a war that isn't about the donkey, mmmkay
ReplyDeleteOr when space has been run by a bloated government bureaucracy, as it is everywhere.
I wondered the other day whether NASA had studied the possibility of converting the shuttle to unmanned remote control. It'd definitely be possible (no harder than flying a cruise missile) but I bet it wouldn't be popular politically.
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