Slashdot Mirror

• Spacevidcast - live talks, with telemetry sidebar
• Eyes on the solar system - pretty cool simulation with view a few meters away from the lander
• BoingBoing, linked earlier in this post
• NASA TV

Happy viewing! Fingers crossed!

p.s. watching the simulation while listening to the beautiful blue danube is kind of fun :)

I happen to like SpaceVidcast:

http://www.spacevidcast.com/live/

They frequently stream NASA TV, plus you have a chatroom full of space nerds who more often than not have answers to almost any technical question you can think up. The only problem comes if they are crushed with visitors, but I've seen them handle 20k simultaneous users before. The chat room gets sort of nuts when you have that many people, so it isn't perfect.

Ben and Cariann also do color commentary when things get pretty slow, but also know when to shut up (unlike the NBC commentators for the Olympics).

One thing that is certainly going to be different is the ability to have the miniature cameras in odd places that didn't exist before. I certainly liked the camera placed on the outside of the Dragon spacecraft that showed the whole splashdown from the perspective of a fly sitting on the outside of the capsule. Such a view perspective wasn't even possible during the Apollo era, where instead if they were lucky there was a U.S. Navy helicopter that had the one ton television camera in an otherwise stripped down aircraft that produced a grainy video feed.... presuming that the helicopter could even find the spacecraft as it was coming down.

In terms of internet coverage, you don't have to worry about some network executive deciding if a major league baseball game or some sitcom is going to get better ratings than a rocket launch... you just have to punch in the URL of some website like SpaceVidcast and you with several 10's of thousands of other people get to watch that launch live.... with or without commentary if you want. Rather than waiting for some public relations official telling you the weather forecast for KSC, you can simply go straight to the NOAA weather station and look up the latest weather radar scan and make your own forecast if you want.

Yeah, the internet has changed things, as has the miniaturization of electronic components. An iPhone has the computing power of all of NASA combined from 1969. Let's just say that the guidance computer is put into the Dragon spacecraft based on what the needs of the pilot are for a visual display and not due to considerations such as weight or power consumption of that computer. Its physical location is more of an afterthought. The largest and most power hungry device is going to be the flat-screen plasma panel for that display, not the computer itself.

Most of the delay on the Deep Space Network is a result of the 30 year old hardware that processes and transmit the signals.. the speed of light defines a minimum that is never practically met. Emory Stagmer talks about it in his interview on Spacevidcast.

What is keeping people from going to Mars on their own dime is not really so much a factor that there are a whole bunch of unknowns about getting there (which is a problem, but not insurmountable), but rather a government willing to even let people do it in the first place.

The regulatory steps that a company must go through in order to get into space is huge, and it becomes a business nightmare to consider that even if you have some of the best and brightest engineers on the Earth that are helping to design a system for going into space, and even if you build the vehicle, that there is a high likelihood that the license to fly the thing won't ever happen. On top of that, the regulator uncertainty is there where you can be performing tests on components one day, and the next day some bureaucrat randomly interprets the flight rules and decides that the test can no longer be performed in that fashion.

This is the issue facing private spaceflight today. The bureaucracy governing spaceflight is oppressive and draconian, and counter productive in terms of encouraging the development of space. If it doesn't belong to NASA, in the past it simply wouldn't fly at all. It took a special act of Congress to be able to let AT&T spend their own money to fly the Telstar satellite, and they paid a double premium over what it cost NASA to fly other similar projects. That was just the first of a great many attempts to have private commercial spaceflight in any degree. Read up on the Constoga I rocket for a real eye opener, or how NASA effectively killed off Mircorp just when they were starting to make a profit.

For a very interesting and recent presentation that discusses the problems that a businessman who has dealt with getting stuff into orbit and doing stuff in space. Rather than merely talk about it... he even hired astronauts (actually cosmonauts) to go up into space for the company he ran (they actually got up there, not merely were hired to talk about it) and has done other stuff in space that is amazing from a commercial perspective:

http://www.spacevidcast.com/2010/01/14/jeffrey-manber-presents-can-capitalism-survive-in-space/

The problems facing businesses working in space are daunting, and most of that is political instead of technical. I swear that there are huge factions of the U.S. government that are determined to kill off the entire U.S. spaceflight industry and are making a deliberate policy decision to see to it that Americans never leave this planet again. Not that it is merely a waste of taxpayer money, but that nobody should be allowed to spend money in that fashion in any circumstance. Going into space is hard enough but with the bureaucratic overload, it seems legitimate almost impossible. It certainly takes tilting at windmills to get anything done, together with greasing the skids by having almost as large of a lobbying presence in Washington D.C. as you have engineers actually building the thing in the first place.

I don't think you quote know the extent of the support for spaceflight that there really is, and the ability to watch something like a shuttle flight is something that may get better ratings for network television than they might think.

With the advent of live streaming via the internet, you no longer have to depend on one of the "big 3" television networks to decide if something is worth airing. You have the choice of either watching the launch on NASA-TV (I've done that a few times), or my current favorite: Watching on SpaceVidCast

Seriously, if you want to see full coverage of a shuttle flight from launch to landing, that is the place to go. On launch day, I've seen as many as 10k "viewers" on that website simultaneously during a "broadcast" or "webcast"... and this is just a backwater website that has spread only by word of mouth. Yes, when astronauts are sleeping and all that is being shown is a view out of one of the windows of the shuttle as the Earth goes by will only have a dozen or so people "logged in" and making the occasional comment. Still, there is interest in what is happening and it is awesome that you can even get such content at all.

SpaceVidcast also has a weekly "news show" about spaceflight, which is also entertaining to see in its own way. Public support for spaceflight is actually larger than you might think, and comes from a surprisingly broad group of individuals with an incredibly diverse range of backgrounds.... both conservative and liberal I might add as well, and there are strong arguments to encourage spaceflight that can be made from either a liberal or conservative viewpoint.

If you watch NASA-TV and the full mission coverage, you won't be seeing much "pointless zero-G trick" and play. Unfortunately, what gets seen on the evening news broadcasts is the "highlights" of those missions include the screw-ups like losing a tool bag or showing the astronauts while they are on a break.

Do you think a news broadcast is going to show the tedium of taking two hours to put on a spacesuit for an EVA, or the 15 seconds it takes to do a 6x backflip in microgravity?

Yeah, better PR can help here, but some of this is the nature of the beast and how news organizations gather material for their readers/listeners/viewers. I do like movies like Apollo 13 that shows some of the incredibly hard work that astronauts put into doing their job, and more stuff like that can (and fortunately has) been made.

To give a plug here, also check out http://www.spacevidcast.com/ for some amazing commentary on spaceflight in general, and quite a bit on human spaceflight in particular. The Higginbothams do a pretty good job of showing both the fun and the hard work going into spaceflight, and aren't afraid to tell the novice space geek what is going on with simple words and descriptions. More NASA PR should be aimed at doing this sort of promotion of spaceflight in general, but I'm glad that Ben and Cariann have indepenent editorial control too. They cover each and every shuttle launch, landing, and even include a live feed (from NASA-TV) with a chat room during each flight to comment about what is going on. Certainly something to check out, and between flights (or when something newsworthy pops up) that is not NASA related, they also provide coverage, such as the recent coverage of the Lunar Landing Challenge attempts (I guess sort of related to NASA but not quite).