Did Bat Hitch a Ride To Space On Discovery?

suraj.sun writes "A bat was seen clinging to the external fuel tank of the Space Shuttle Discovery before its launch on Sunday, apparently clung for dear life to the side of the tank as the spaceship lifted off. The shuttle accelerates to an orbital velocity of 17,500 milers per hour, which is 25 times faster than the speed of sound, in just over eight minutes. That's zero to 100 mph in 10 seconds. Did it make it into space? No one knows yet. But photos of Discovery as it cleared the launch tower showed a tiny speck on the side of the tank. When those photos were blown up, it became apparent that the speck was a bat."

Comments

Seriously

[ledow]

I'm just glad it wasn't a mission to somewhere other than our immediate space. Whether or not the bat survives, throwing a kilo or so of biological/bacterialogical matter around could seriously jeopardise the sterility of some quite interesting places. Send a mission to Mars one week, find the next week that it's overrun by heat-loving bacteria that spread like mad and cover the planet. It's not impossible, and then where would our search for the origins of life be?

Moreover, I'm surprised that they didn't cancel the flight for such a thing. It only needs to slightly dislodge a heat tile, or create some other tiny imbalance and the shuttle crew could be toast. You can't launch in a sterile environment, but if you spotted the damn thing and "just hoped" it would fly away, that's pretty poor risk management. I hope they at least did a quick back-of-the-envelope look to see if it *could* be risky, rather than just hoping it wouldn't be.

Re:Bats are _not_ rodents, dangit!

[interested pyro]

I see someone hasn't thrown out their Calvin and Hobbes comics from when they were 5....

Re:I can hear it now...

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Actually, the second a conservative hears about it, the conservative will make up an unfunny-ridiculous-but-disconnected-from-reality joke about environmentalists.