Apollo X - Thomas Stafford, Gene Cernan, John Young

Orbiter Columbia OV-102 had a unique external feature the “SILTS” pod (Shuttle Infrared Leeside Temperature Sensing), it was located on the top of her vertical stabilizer. It was installed after STS-9 (1984) to acquire infrared and other thermal data on the vehicle’s environment. The instruments were removed after several missions but the pod remained.

Mission Specialist Sally Ride sits in aft flight deck mission specialists seat of STS-7 Challenger during deorbit preparations.

Date: June 24, 1983

NASA ID: STS007-31-1603

Challenger thrusting, STS-41B, 3-11 February 1984.

Snapshots of Earth, captured by Apollo 16 astronauts on this day in 1972.

Great shots of China’s Chang’e 4 lander, the first Chinese spacecraft to make a soft landing on the surface of the Moon. These were taken from the Yutu 2 robotic rover.

Interesting to note, the Yutu 2’s mission was supposed to last only 3 days, but it’s exceeded that by 362 days!

More can be seen at moon.bao.ac.cn

HP 9845C by ✖ Daniel Rehn

girls after saying something smart: So yeah

I feel like the world could benefit from a realistic visual sci-fi that heavily focuses on characters and moods. Space as it really is has a huge potential for moods. The way in which space exposes humans to all number of dangers, physical and psychological, is something that has not really been explored enough.

I doubt that every space habitat will have spin gee. If we understand our current political system, we can assume that a freefall, non-rotating habitat would be cheaper to live in. People who decide to move to space for whatever reason will use their life savings to find a cramped, tiny cupboard in some space station.

Your bones get thinner. Your eyesight gets worse. Your blood pressure goes down. You don't feel as hungry. Your muscles shrink. Your skin loses all its tan from hiding in the dark. The tops of your feet get calicoes from hooking onto things.

You get depressed. Isolated. Claustrophobic. Tired of seeing the same room every day. Irritable. Irrational. Anxious. After a long time, atheists would turn superstitious.

These things have been explored a bit from what I've seen, but they seem to be background elements of some greater story. Maybe it's just not possible to make this topic the focus of a movie. The closest I've seen is Ad Astra, which is an okay movie.

We will eventually spend years in space. Someday, people will be born there. We will be sickly and depressed, even with spin gee. This would have signified the ultimate migration of human living from the natural to the mechanical. From death by biology to death by astrodynamics. Where you have to be a technical genius to not die if something malfunctions.

Space is not luxurious. People won't actively choose to move there en masse without a good reason. Migration into space will take hundreds of years.

Don't get me wrong, The Expanse is one of my favourite shows, but I don't watch it for the combat and politics.