Astronaut Chris Hadfield Performs Space Oddity On the ISS

An anonymous reader writes "With updated lyrics, commander of expedition 35 on the International Space Station, Chris Hadfield, sings Space Oddity on board the ISS. He's not Bowie, but he's pretty good."

Comments

Ashes to Ashes

[Bing Tsher E]

That seems like such a weird song to sing up there sitting in a tin can.

Bowie sorta updated the matter on Scary Monsters anyway.

ashes to ashes funk to funky
we know major tom's a junky
strung out on heaven's high
hitting an all time low

Re:Viral Marketing by NASA

[yincrash]

Chris Hadfield is a Canadian (working for the CSA). I'm sure that Chris would like more people to want to go in to space and become scientists, etc. If you look at his previous videos though, I would say this is pretty in line with the other stuff he's done (just with more effort in to it).

Re:Viral Marketing by NASA

[yincrash]

Additionally, this is the person in the credits who edited it, also a Canadian, and doesn't work for any space agency. Let's try not to think everything is a conspiracy, please.

Re:Great footage too

[ldobehardcore]

Skylab was never really meant to be a long-term satellite. It spent 2,249 and only 171 of those were spent occupied. In comparison, the ISS has been in orbit for 5288 days, 4575 of them occupied. So I'd say ISS is over twice as kickass, and over 25 times as habitable as skylab.

Not very long delay, station is really close

[SuperKendall]

Isn't there a lag in communications?

The ISS orbits around 330km - 435 km above the earth (around 230 miles on average). That's less than the width of a single province in Canada!

If you look at various communication delays based on distance, and assume that during the performance the ISS was basically roughly over Canada or even the U.S, you can see that the delay would be substantially less than for most international phone calls! In fact calling from one major city to another in the same country probably has as much delay, and there's no discernible delay to the caller in that case (well if you aren't using Skype).

It just goes to show how there's not much up you have to go before you are in space.

Also one could imagine that if you were "super serious" and kind of nerdy about doing a performance (as both the commander and BNL would be), that you might also set up a synchronized metronome that really did clock off at exactly the same time at the two locations to help the performer on the ISS stay in sync. But I doubt that was needed, and for a performance it's probably far more valuable to be able to riff off how the other performers are playing.

Re:Not very long delay, station is really close

[FireFury03]

Does anyone have an idea why they're doing this? IIRC the distance to geostationary orbit is bigger than the omne to ground, so why waste energy for that long distance stuff?

At a guess: the Ku band geostationary satellites are already there commercially, so its cheap to just buy some bandwidth when they need it. Doing high bandwidth communications with the ISS directly would require an extensive network of dedicated ground stations with pointable dishes (and appropriate backhauls between them) - remember the ISS is doing an orbit every 90 minutes, so a single ground station isn't going to be able to keep a connection for long. A geostationary sat is going to be able to keep the ISS within its coverage area for much longer than a ground station.

Re:Not very long delay, station is really close

[Half-pint HAL]

Does anyone have an idea why they're doing this? IIRC the distance to geostationary orbit is bigger than the omne to ground, so why waste energy for that long distance stuff?

The ISS orbits the Earth 15.7 times a day. It has an orbital period of 92 minutes and 50 seconds. That means that it's rotational velocity relative to the centre of the Earth is almost 4 degrees per minute, which is pretty difficult to track.

Of course, that's assuming your antenna is at the centre of the Earth, and the Earth doesn't obstruct signals (not true). In the real world, your antenna is on the surface of the Earth, and is only going to be able to communicate with the space station when it's passing overhead. The angular velocity of the station relative to you is going to be much, much higher than 4 degrees a minute, because it's coming mostly towards you, passing relatively close. (The Earth's radius is 6371 km and the ISS orbits at 330 to 435 km of altitude, so it's pretty close.

If you can't picture this difference in relative velocity, imagine a fast car on a long circular race track. Imagine you're standing in the middle and turning to watch it as it circles you at constant speed. Now imagine yourself trackside. The car whings past you in the blink of an eye, then takes a seemingly long time to go round the rest of the track, and when it gets back to you, it whings past again.

So while the path of the ISS can be accurately computed in advance and could theoretically be programmed into a motorised antenna, it would have to be a very very expensive motorised antenna, and it would have to be meticulously cleaned before every use to avoid any of the bearings jammed even for a fraction of a second.

Not only that, but if we picture ourselves back at the trackside, we get the familiar weeeEEEEEE-Yowoooooooooo as the car passes us: the so-called Doppler effect. Any direct transmission between the ISS and ground stations would suffer the same distortion due to relative speeds. A broadcast to geostationary orbit suffers no doppler effect relative to any point on the surface of the Earth (obviously -- zero relative velocity), and the distortion due to the relative speed of the ISS vs geostationary is pretty much negligible (the ISS's orbit has a radius of approximately 6700km, whereas a geostationary satellite's rotation has a radius of 42000km -- you're no longer at the race track; you're now watching someone driving in a small circle at the opposite side of the car park, and the engine noise doesn't change pitch perceptibly).

Can we at least spell the astronaut's name right?

[cmason]

I mean, in the title. Really? The dude's in space. I think the least we can do for him is not space out on the spelling of his name.

Re:Congrats

[tlhIngan]

This guy's near daily media appearances has certainly inspired many canadians including myself. I have watched many children sing along with his ISS song (not as good as david bowie, but its the thought that counts) and it really inspires. Hopefully helping lots of kids to think about becoming scientists, researchers and yes astronauts. Space can seem so dull sometimes, he really brings it to life.

I may not care for much patriotically these days, but hes really doing canada a service being so media savvy. I am not sure if american astronauts do so much singing, and perhaps its covered extensively by their local media and I just never hear about it. But he really could be one of a kind.

Before he launched in December, Chris mentioned he was going to do the first album recorded in space, I'm hoping this was just a taste of what's coming.

I have to be honest, I've been watching a LOT of Chris' videos that get posted by the CSA (Canadian Space Agency) (an agency facing budget cuts from the Harper Government(tm)). I don't think I've seen anyone from the ISS do so much media relations in their off time.

I know a few other commanders have done media work - Don Pettit did some as well. With the American Physical Society (any physics major should know them) he did a bunch of videos called "Science off the Sphere" (which I apparently finally got my T-Shirt from that).

Chris is definitely very media friendly and has hosted a LOT Of media events while aboard - he even keeps in touch with Discovery Canada's Daily Planet, the longest running science program around. Honestly, Chris Hadfield is awesome!

Safe journey home - your country eagerly awaits your arrival!

(Alas, Canada's first astronaut was snubbed recently...)

Re:If this is what we currently have on our task l

[Anonymous Coward]

... then we need to shut down this thing NOW! We seriously have NOTHING BETTER TO DO WITH BILLIONS OF DOLLARS WORTH OF TREASURE than to record a music video? This is rediculous. Let's turn off the lights, lock the door on the way out and save that money for something more important. Don't give me this "national pride" or "scientific discover" B.S. If that stuff needs to get done, then F'ing do it and don't waste time singing in space. This is probably the most collossal waste of resources imaginable. How many resources were needed to scrub the air necessary for the singing? When you are in space, that stuff matters, A LOT! The first take wasn't the last take, that I know. Don't give me the "get kids into science" schtick either. Kids who are swayed by silly things like this, statistically don't end up any good at the math needed for real science anyway. I teach our "future engineers" in a top state university. Most can't even solve a triangle, let alone deal with any higher math. If you are swayed by this commercial, you don't have the chops to stick with an engineering career.

1) People need downtime.
2) They actually set a record for science utilization http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/05/12/hadfield-iss-returns-earth.html

Re:l'art pour l'art

[gman003]

You, and several other haters, are falling for a variant of the sunk cost fallacy - that, because it was so expensive to get him into space, every second of his time needs to be occupied in "useful tasks".

That's not how it works. There has to be some "down time", both as a buffer against the "useful tasks" taking longer than anticipated (like that ammonia leak they had to fix a few days ago), and just because human beings cannot be working every waking minute.

The cost/benefit analysis included those necessary "down times", and it was deemed worth it to send him into space. This music video was not planned for, but there was sufficient extra time found for it, and I'm sure once again, it was deemed more productive than anything else he could do (remember, a lot of "productive work" requires new equipment to be shipped up there, which is expensive).

Re:Music recorded on Earth

[_anomaly_]

The guitar and vocals were, in fact, recorded in space.

The music was mixed with his guitar and vocals on Earth. What else do you want? Chris Hadfield in space, mixing tracks with the original recording in Pro Tools? Him playing the piano accompaniment on the ISS?