WATCH: Astronaut Chris Hadfield Covers Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ in Space
May 13, 2013
He’s become an online star, by sharing stunning photos and videos of the Earth from space during his five-month stay on the International Space Station.
But after handing over command of the station to Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov ahead of his return to Earth on Monday, the Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield had one more treat for his fans down below: a cover version of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”
In the clip, believed to be the first music video filmed in space, Hadfield floats around the space station singing the 1969 track (with modified lyrics such as, “Ground control to Major Tom, lock your Soyuz hatch and put your helmet on,” referencing how his spacecraft will land him in Kazakhstan) and playing an acoustic guitar while gazing at the Earth 230 miles below.
The video, which has already been viewed over half a million times, has even moved Bowie himself to show his appreciation, tweeting: CHRIS HADFIELD SINGS SPACE ODDITY IN SPACE! “Hallo Spaceboy…”
Location: On the edge of tomorrow looking back at yesterday. Gender:
Posted:
Mar 9, 2011 - 3:49pm
aflanigan wrote:
Well, you seem to be in the camp of those who support manned spaceflight spending. Fair enough!
The fact that the budget for NASA represents a fairly small portion of our trillions of dollars overall budget is a poor argument for ignoring waste therein. The Republican led congress is trying do defund Public Broadcasting to the tune of a measly $420 million per year. If they want to go after such trifling amounts they certainly should take a look at NASA's annual budget which is over forty times the size of CPB's! I agree that they should also take a hard look at the Pentagon's budget; that's where a lot of money is spent. But sound trimming will require cuts wherever they are feasible.
I don't think any of the technologies you mention (microwaves, cell phones, GPS) derived from NASA's exploration of space.The accident of the space shuttle "Challenger" means a drawback for the GPS program, as the space shuttles were supposed to transport Block II GPS satellites to their orbit. Finally the operators of the program revert to the Delta rockets intended for the transportation in the first place.
In other words, manned spaceflight vehicles were never essential for deploying satellites. It was likely that the job was given to Challenger in order to make this bloated program look useful and productive.
R&D programs that are earth-based are the ones that actually produce the benefits you claim for manned spaceflight programs like the Shuttle (Bell Labs, for example; see the link above regarding the history of Mobile Phones). Imagine how wasteful it would have been if we had insisted on relocating Bell Labs to an orbiting satellite in order to do R & D work that could just as well have been performed on earth (where the trains usually run on time). Of course, people (mainly NASA officials and PR flaks) have struggled valiantly to argue/prove that the microgravity environment present during Shuttle flights permits unique research opportunities not available on earth. Robert Park gave testimony before Congress in 2003 that dealt exhaustively and dispositively with these claims:
I encourage you to read his entire testimony. Some choice quotes:
"The research (conducted on ISS and the Shuttle) is not wrong, it is just not very important. No field of science has been significantly affected by research carried out on the Shuttle or on Mir at great cost. Much of it has never even been published in leading peer-reviewed journals.
You claim there are "limitations" on what we can learn from the robotic exploration of space, that there are "things only physical human presence can attain". This strikes me as wishful thinking at best. What are these limitations? What are these things only physical presence can attain? Imagine we had decided to similarly hobble our exploration of the deep sea with an insistence that "man has to be there" or else we cannot get a full and meaningful exploration of this inhospitable environment.
Nor is dealing with overpopulation by space colonization any more practical as a justification for manned space flight. If anything, it's orders of magnitude more impractical than conducting research in space. Where would we exile people from our overcrowded planet to? Putting aside the cost considerations of the huge payloads, and the technical challenges necessary to "bug out" a significant number of humans (and their pet fleas and crabs), one of the things we've learned from manned space flight that actually turns out to be useful in this regard is how unsuited the human body is to microgravity environments, and indeed to any environment other than the one we are genetically disposed to thrive in (earth). The only viable solution to overpopulation is population control. It's cheap and effective.
Well I see we're in two different camps and well entrenched.
I'm not going to make a big deal about this subject, but I'll give you my simple rebuttal. My comments were in general about NASA and not one specific project, i.e. the shuttle or space station and not just the exploration of space.
As for the budget, I'm not going to get into politics and who's doing what with cuts and who bloated the budgets with special projects. As far as I'm concerned they're all guilty as hell, R&D's. Public broadcasting should not be touched as well as some of the humanitarian aide to the less fortunate. Politics is a slippery slope and I'm not going to taint this forum with that. There is too many RP forums for that and I stay well clear of them, cause you can never have a civil conversation in there without trash talking breaking out.
With that said I know a little about some of those programs first hand.
My dad worked for Raytheon for over 39 years and I'm aware that the microwave was a happy accident as well as ceramic heaters and other things that can't be mentioned. I was talking in general about these items and how the evolution and development of a lot of these were continued for space applications.
I worked on the NAVSTAR GPS satellite components that were destroyed on the Challenger in the early 80's and I'm aware that they were capable of being deployed by rocket. The launch deployment from the cargo bay was in essence a safer way to deploy these satellites as well as the secrete spy satellites which would be visible from a ground launch.
Robotics are limited in what they can do. For those rovers on Mars for instant are the best money spent for the limited testing and surveying the small areas they're exploring. Artificial intellegence is decades if not longer away from self sustaining, exploration, building and decision making. Still need a group of human to run those rovers and that time lag to communicate is a real bitch if you need an instant correction or maneuver. And that's only on Mars our close neighbor. Outer planets or even another solar systems will not be able to be fully explored without some kind of human presence.
As for the overpopulation problem we will be facing in the very near future has nothing to do with exiling people to another planet. Who even thinks that? Colonization starts small, building a foothold and expands from that. Mining would be the primary function of any new expansion.
As for population control, I give you China and India and half of the world population... As for cheap and effective, what are you going to do, spay and neuter human kind? Who has the right to make that decision? That's a whole new can of worms I'm staying clear of.
My comments were only a generalization of humankind's maned space exploration and the future we will have to decide. Do you really think Earth can sustain the kind of abuse man has inflicted on it?
This has now given me a headache. Too much writing, reading and thinking.
We're supposed to get the sonic booms around 11:50.
Out here in flyover country we used to get sonic booms all the time, no big deal. But I haven't heard one in decades... I'm sure I'd freak out about it.
I was, but you seem to have an axe to grind about the manned space program.
Out of a $3.4 trillion federal budget, less than 0.7% is spent on the entire space program! versus 38% for the military. And after this years budget cuts, it will be even less. We waste even more on pork projects in this country to make the shuttle program look like petty cash.
There are things that we have benefited from the the space program like microwave's, GPS, cell phone's and new metal alloys to just scratch the surface. And for every dollar the spent on R & D on the space program, it receives $8 back in the form of income taxes from increased private sector jobs, economic growth and technologies. I'm just waiting with baited breath for the new plasma drive to be tested later this year on the space station.
There is a lot of things that we have benefited from, even from that bloated shuttle program that you will never hear about. It was a limited work horse for low Earth orbits enabling the construction of another bloated project, the space station, but a lot of good has come out of it, especially in the medical fields. Remember these programs are based on 60 and 70's technology.
Space is very dangerous for mankind, but with the ever crowding Earth, we're destined to explore and colonize space because there are limitations in robotics and things that only physical human presence can attain. We're running out of resources on this little sphere of rock.
This is too big a subject to discuss in just a few paragraphs and has been debated and will be debated for decades to come.
Remember the Earth was once flat until man set forth to discover what was over the horizon.
Watch out for the mermaids, sea monsters and grey's!
Well, you seem to be in the camp of those who support manned spaceflight spending. Fair enough!
The fact that the budget for NASA represents a fairly small portion of our trillions of dollars overall budget is a poor argument for ignoring waste therein. The Republican led congress is trying to defund Public Broadcasting to the tune of a measly $420 million per year. If they want to go after such trifling amounts they certainly should take a look at NASA's annual budget which is over forty times the size of CPB's! I agree that they should also take a hard look at the Pentagon's budget; that's where a lot of money is spent. But sound trimming will require cuts wherever they are feasible.
I don't think any of the technologies you mention (microwaves, cell phones, GPS) derived from NASA's exploration of space.
Let's take the microwave. That was invented in 1946, before there even was a NASA (or it's predecessor, NACA) See here:
The accident of the space shuttle "Challenger" means a drawback for the GPS program, as the space shuttles were supposed to transport Block II GPS satellites to their orbit. Finally the operators of the program revert to the Delta rockets intended for the transportation in the first place.
In other words, manned spaceflight vehicles were never essential for deploying satellites. It was likely that the job was given to Challenger in order to make this bloated program look useful and productive.
R&D programs that are earth-based are the ones that actually produce the benefits you claim for manned spaceflight programs like the Shuttle (Bell Labs, for example; see the link above regarding the history of Mobile Phones). Imagine how wasteful it would have been if we had insisted on relocating Bell Labs to an orbiting satellite in order to do R & D work that could just as well have been performed on earth (where the trains usually run on time). Of course, people (mainly NASA officials and PR flaks) have struggled valiantly to argue/prove that the microgravity environment present during Shuttle flights permits unique research opportunities not available on earth. Robert Park gave testimony before Congress in 2003 that dealt exhaustively and dispositively with these claims:
I encourage you to read his entire testimony. Some choice quotes:
"The research (conducted on ISS and the Shuttle) is not wrong, it is just not very important. No field of science has been significantly affected by research carried out on the Shuttle or on Mir at great cost. Much of it has never even been published in leading peer-reviewed journals.
The real objective of the most expensive science laboratory ever constructed is to provide astronauts with something to do. Ned Ludd, an English laborer who destroyed weaving machinery in 1779 to preserve jobs, would have cheered. But human progress is now measured by the extent to which machines are used to replace humans to perform tasks that are dangerous or menial."
As Park points out, it once seemed "inevitable" in the conquest of space to consider having a space station capable of human occupation. Now, our physical presence in outer space is a wastefully expensive impediment to the continued discovery of space.
You claim there are "limitations" on what we can learn from the robotic exploration of space, that there are "things only physical human presence can attain". This strikes me as wishful thinking at best. What are these limitations? What are these things only physical presence can attain? Imagine we had decided to similarly hobble our exploration of the deep sea with an insistence that "man has to be there" or else we cannot get a full and meaningful exploration of this inhospitable environment.
Nor is dealing with overpopulation by space colonization any more practical as a justification for manned space flight. If anything, it's orders of magnitude more impractical than conducting research in space. Where would we exile people from our overcrowded planet to? Putting aside the cost considerations of the huge payloads, and the technical challenges necessary to "bug out" a significant number of humans (and their pet fleas and crabs), one of the things we've learned from manned space flight that actually turns out to be useful in this regard is how unsuited the human body is to microgravity environments, and indeed to any environment other than the one we are genetically disposed to thrive in (earth). The only viable solution to overpopulation is population control. It's cheap and effective.
I'm not concerned with fantastical creatures like mermaids, but about humans with fantastical justifications for manned space flight.
Location: On the edge of tomorrow looking back at yesterday. Gender:
Posted:
Mar 7, 2011 - 9:35pm
aflanigan wrote:
You're kidding, right?
The total cost that has been sunk into what was originally meant to be an "economical" means for space travel for use by NASA, DOD, and commercial and scientific users is about $174 billion. By comparison, Hubble's cumulative costs are estimated to be about $4.5-6 billion. The life-cycle cost of Hubble's replacement , the JWST, is estimated to be in about the same neighborhood (somewhere around 5 billion). It will be launched in a couple of years by an unmanned, expendable Ariane 5 launch vehicle at a cost of about $120 million. So if there never had been a space shuttle program, the flaw in the Hubble could have been resolved by either building an entire replacement with corrected optics or advancing the development schedule of the JWST (let's say by doubling or tripling the budget to get those contractors to work fast) and you would have had enough money left over to launch another 12-14 space telescopes, providing over a century's worth of astronomical observations and data.
Like most tail-end baby boomers (or Tweeners or members of Generation Jones), I grew up a fan of Tom Swift, and was delighted with the success of Apollo 11. The success of the Mars Rover, Galileo, and other unmanned missions has demonstrated conclusively that we don't need (and right now can't afford) the luxury of sending people unnecessarily into space to breath, vomit, pee and poop and monitor sensors and equipment that can more affordably be monitored from the earth. In this era of unmanned drones or UAVs on the battlefield, it makes no sense to continue to send manned spacecraft onto the "battlefield" of the quest for extraterrestrial knowledge, no matter how romantic astronaut diapers are.
I was, but you seem to have an axe to grind about the manned space program.
Out of a $3.4 trillion federal budget, less than 0.7% is spent on the entire space program! versus 38% for the military. And after this years budget cuts, it will be even less. We waste even more on pork projects in this country to make the shuttle program look like petty cash.
There are things that we have benefited from the the space program like microwave's, GPS, cell phone's and new metal alloys to just scratch the surface. And for every dollar the spent on R & D on the space program, it receives $8 back in the form of income taxes from increased private sector jobs, economic growth and technologies. I'm just waiting with baited breath for the new plasma drive to be tested later this year on the space station.
There is a lot of things that we have benefited from, even from that bloated shuttle program that you will never hear about. It was a limited work horse for low Earth orbits enabling the construction of another bloated project, the space station, but a lot of good has come out of it, especially in the medical fields. Remember these programs are based on 60 and 70's technology.
Space is very dangerous for mankind, but with the ever crowding Earth, we're destined to explore and colonize space because there are limitations in robotics and things that only physical human presence can attain. We're running out of resources on this little sphere of rock.
This is too big a subject to discuss in just a few paragraphs and has been debated and will be debated for decades to come.
Remember the Earth was once flat until man set forth to discover what was over the horizon.
Watch out for the mermaids, sea monsters and grey's!
Who has the right to make that decision? That's a whole new can of worms I'm staying clear of.
