Houston, We have a Space Station!

jedibfa writes: "Zvezda and Zaraya docked successfully tonight around 8:45 EDT. Check out the report at space.com. This sets the stage for a crew later this year! I for one have been holding my breath since 1998. Upward and onward. Bring on NASA's missions." Now all we need is a couple of rolls of duct tape to get a good seal, and we're all set.

This submission just came in:

flufffy writes: "Another module, the Russian Zvezda ("Star"), has just joined the two existing ISS modules up in orbit. The station is now plenty big enough to be seen from the Earth's surface. But where exactly should you look? NASA's SkyWatch, available here, shows you. After you've download the small 300k app., it asks you for your Lat/Long and the satellite you're interested in (including shuttle re-entries), before calculating when and where you can see it next. You can print out the data as a sky chart, with constellations marked! As the ISS seems to be around the equator at the moment, it's low in the southern sky for U.S. skywatchers. Still, the program showed me where to look to the south of Sagitarrius, at about 1 a.m. on the morning of July 26th. This is really cool, and will only get more fun as the ISS gets larger and more visible."

Comments

Re:Make work waste of time and money

[torpor]

Just because you fail to see the benefits of the space program, doesn't mean that thousands of Russian scientists who put their hearts and souls into the program don't see why it's necessary.

You think those guys are just sitting around in mission control going "well gee, duh, this space stuff sure is fun... Lets eat raw potato while we flink stuff around in space"?

I don't think so. They, along with thousands and thousands of support personnel in the space and aviation industry, understand the importance of the space program to the expansion of human science.

There is so much for the future of Russian economy to be gained from the space program, its not even funny. Space manufacturing, medicine, electronics - all of these human endeavours stand to benefit from research to be done on the ISS over the next few years, and the Russians know this just as well as any corporate bigwig at McDonnall/Douglas or Boeing.

Space is probably about the only thing the Russians are good at, as an industrialized nation, right now, and so it follows that they are putting their heart and soul into continuing to lead and participate in human exploration of space. Russian pursuits of space programs are *vital* to the future economic stability of the Russian system, since it's among the few truly exportable industries that Russia has right now, having lost a great deal of her productive power due to Communist misguidance.

That you cannot see this, or are unwilling to be able to even *think* that scientists and great minds of this ilk have an accute awareness of the benefits for what they're doing, belies your pop-culture, spoon-fed, MTV instant fix upbringing.

The hard working souls behind every nations space program are doing it for humanity, and for the benefits it will bring to humanity in the coming years - and while it may not seem too accessible to the plebian uneducated masses such as yourself right now, you (or, god help us if you breed, your children) will most certainly stand to benefit from it in the future.

OT: $435 hammer myth

[jonnythan]

I'm sick of seeing this "$200 for a doorknob, $435 for a hammer" crap people spout about the government.

This is where those numbers really come from:
The government often pays for things to be beuilt by contract. Instead of listing every item and price on invoices or work orders or whatever the hell they are, they take the price of the entire contract and divide it by however many items there are. Thus, though a computer system on an F-16 may cost $10,000 and the special gold tempered cockpit glass may cost $50,000 per bubble, a hammer used by Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics (aren't they the same company now or something?) still only costs $15 or $20.

So, in other words, while we're paying $435 for a hammer, we're also paying $435 for the highly special radar scanning tip in the nose of the aircraft.

Space Station User's Guide

[Phrogman]

The Space Station User's Guide is a terrific resource on the entire space station (written and assembled by one of the engineers who worked on it BTW), including the live NASA TV broadcast of the docking.

And yes, I submitted this link this morning to Slashdot but it got rejected in favour of the Space.com link in this story - go figure.