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Jack King, known to many as the voice of NASA, died last week at age 84. He did the launch countdowns for many Gemini and Apollo missions, and his voice (taken from the Apollo 11 launch) is still often heard in commercials and such (including a current one for the Science Museum of Minnesota's "Space" exhibit).

There's still nothing quite like watching those old Saturn V launches.

I've been eagerly, eagerly watching and waiting for New Horizons to reach Pluto since it first launched over 10 years ago. Now we're only a week and a half from getting high resolution photos (in color!) of this most distant and least known planet (yeah, I went there ). NASA has already posted some color motion photos of Pluto as the probe speeds towards it. Glorious!!!

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newho ... index.html

Just thinking it's a pity that they didn't have cameraphones a hundred years ago, otherwise Digory could have snapped a few pics of Jupiter and its moons while travelling between The Wood Between The Worlds and London...

46 years ago today...

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

That brings back memories of crowding around our little TV on a hot July evening to see those black-and-white shots from the Moon. I couldn't get enough of Apollo coverage on radio or TV back then (occasionally to the dismay of others ) but we were all watching that night.

I enjoyed reading this item about Buzz Aldrin's recent tweet of expense reports for his 1969 Apollo 11 moon mission. He was reimbursed for $33.31 ($216.59 after inflation) for government travel (to Houston, the Moon, and the USS Hornet recovery ship) and use of government air and spacecraft.

A moderator on the NaNoWriMo forums linked this youtube video of Commander Chris Hadfield singing David Bowie's 1969 song "Space Oddity" (Ground Control to Major Tom) performed from the ISS. Thought I'd share it here just for fun.

Check out this spectacular picture of the earth rising over the moon, taken recently by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Who else watched the Falcon Heavy take off (and 2/3 land) yesterday? As impressive as it was, I was rather amused by the Tesla with Starman heading for permanent orbit around the Sun.

I watched it a few times online. I also liked the Tesla on its way to orbit.

Managed to watch it live, even though I was at work. Thought I was going to miss it, as the desktop machine wouldn't load the livestream. Finally tried a newer laptop, and got it to go about 7 minutes before launch. Rather too close for comfort! Also gathered all the kids who were there to see it--they didn't seem to find it too out-of-the-ordinary. I guess space launches are old hat for them.

We've watched a number of SpaceX launches, including some of the ones that didn't make it; this was pretty special, and you could tell from all the cheering that everyone there thought so too. And the two coming down together, perfectly in sync? Pity about the core, I suppose, but that's what makes live launches so thrilling--the possibility of things going sideways.

I watched it online after the fact. I never watched an entire space launch before, I thought it was pretty amazing! Especially the boosters landing at the same time.

The latest issue of Sky and Telescope mentioned NASA's ISS HD Earth Viewing Experiment. Cameras on the ISS provide a constant view of the earth below.

This can be seen online here. I've looked at it occasionally the past few days and have seen some spectacular vistas - especially when the station is passing from day into night or vice versa.

Often there is just a bunch of blue (the oceans) and white (clouds), and the station is in darkness about half the time so there's not much to see then.

It can be hard to determine exactly what is in view, so I've paired it up with the front page of http://www.heavens-above.com, which shows the location of the ISS (refresh the page to update the location). The two together give a good idea of exactly what is being shown below.

I've tried looking for city lights and the auroral oval, but so far without success.

I got the opportunity last week to go hear Fred Haise speak at Space Center Houston. It's a free talk that they do once a month apparently with different speakers. He talked a lot about things other than just Apollo 13. They tried a new question system where you e-mail it in and I got to ask him what was one of his favorite topics to study while prepping for missions and he said Geology. It wasn't something they taught in school so it gave him a lot to learn and think about.

I'd forgotten he was from Biloxi, Mississippi.

If Elon Musk walked up to me and offered me a one way ticket to Mars, I'd say yes in a heartbeat. No questions asked. I'm going to die one day, might as well do it as one of the first humans to step foot on an alien world. Seriously though, this period in history is so boring. I reckon that if you had told JFK that we would meet his decade deadline, then return to the moon a total of six times between '69 and '72 and then never return for nearly fifty years, he might have called you insane. But here we are in 2019, regressed so far that the United States doesn't even have the capability to send our own astronauts to the ISS. It's almost depressing how slowely we've progressed. I just hope I get to witness that mars landing before I die

I don't even like traveling by plane, I doubt a spaceship would be much better. But of course with those companies offering flights to the moon if you have enough money, space travel might be the next 'fad' and once it became more affordable, it could really take off, pun intended

Edited addition: Even thought The Jetsons lied to us(life was supposed to be like that now, wasn't it?), if there was a new habitable planet that was going to be colonized, I'd like to sign up for that, being able to homestead on an unspoiled world would more than make up for the hassle in getting there.