Good Morning, I'm catching up on my Space News Updates from Bill Harwood of CBS, and it looks like they had a good exchange with one of the students they talked to while in orbit. It has always been my opinion there is nothing up in sky that I particularly want to SEE. Rather, I'm interested in what I could possibly HEAR. I want to listen to the universe expand/contract (what is the current theory?). But, this sounds pretty awesome. I could possibly be wrong about the visual temptation. As some of you know, me being wrong only happens once a year. The jury is still deliberating, so don't light the fireworks yet.
In one of the more interesting exchanges, a student asked if the astronauts could see constellations in space from their lofty perch above Earth's atmosphere.
"You know, initially when we first came up here, both the space shuttle and the space station were both very lit up, almost like a small city, and it made it tough to see anything," Drew said. "Actually, I had an easier time seeing stars in Houston. Last night, we turned out all the lights on both the shuttle and the station, looked out the window and it as a glorious sight out there. You could see the entire Milky Way, you could see the dust clouds of the Milky Way, I think Barb even saw a shooting star beneath us last night. We saw thunder storms over the world, it was pretty fabulous, you could make out all the constellations in the sky."
"It was interesting," Morgan said, "it started out in the orbit we were in, we were at night time and we were looking out at the night sky and all the things Al just described we could see. We were traveling over Africa at the time, but looking out at the night sky. And then as we got to the Indian Ocean, it was black, black, black and that's where we saw all the thunderstorms. And I don't think any of us had ever seen anything quite that bright, those flashes of light.
"And then off in the distance, in another, say, 20 minutes or so, a thin blue line started appearing. And that blue line got thicker and thicker, it started to get a little blurred and all these different colors of blue were in that line and we realized we were looking at the horizon with the sunrise coming and we could see layers of cloud in that horizon. Within just a few minutes, our faces were totally lit up and the space station was shimmering, the solar arrays were just like the orange filaments in your toaster, they were just shimmering, bright, bright, bright gold. It was a beautiful sight."
Later, Drew, a veteran military helicopter pilot making his first space flight, described what it's like to blast off aboard a shuttle for Idaho Public Television:
"There was no doubt when the solid rocket boosters lit, it was just like being inside of a washing machine that was in a bad spin cycle. There was a pretty good shake going up the whole way, just a tremendous amount of sheer fun. We knew we were heading off the planet! There was a big thump when the solid rocket boosters left the orbiter and then it was a much smoother ride from there on up but the Gs started picking up. It felt like there was something heavy standing on my chest. ... It took effort to breathe the whole time. In fact, I kind of felt myself wheezing for the last few minutes as we were going through three Gs. And then suddenly we went from 3 Gs to nothing, I felt my body just slam against the shoulder straps of the seat, it was almost like we recoiled off the back of the seat and we were weightless. I want to find another quarter to put back in there and go for another ride!"
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