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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."
Bragging rights like "First Music Video in Space" don't come around every day!
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.
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I am a Canadian and have seen Chris Hadfield at several presentation. He didn't market anything other than promoting people to pick up an interest in science. I think the high quality video/data transmission capability is something NASA is really proud of technically and they are trying to come up with reasons to show it off. And I agree its really sad that America has forgot how much research and technology NASA has spit out and how much more it could spit out.
I disagree.
America may have forgotten about the drive to build, explore, settle, create, but humanity hasn't. Space isn't sour grapes. It's hard, and settling it is going to be a lot harder. But it will happen.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Yep, it makes it seem pretty fucking stupid that we used 37 Space Shuttle missions with a 25 tonne payload capacity to build and supply this space station when it could have been built simpler with a couple of Saturn Vs.
The lesson here is that heavy lifting capability is how you win in space, not super fancy flying trucks. It probably would have been cheaper to build an ISS in orbit and another spare orbiting the Moon with heavy lift rockets than to go the piecemeal way that we did.
Here's the video of him talking about playing the guitar in space.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLRunqi1mDM
Advantage is that you don't need a guitar strap, disadvantage is that you float around if you'd not holding something with your feet. Also tend to mis-fret when first in space.
You can see the velcro on it in the Bowie song, but i think that is more for stowage than use.
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!
As far as I can tell, the high bandwidth connections they use for media events are done by bouncing a Ku band signal off geostationary satellites(*), and the delay is significant (watch any of his videos taking questions from school kids and you'll see a noticable communications delay).
(* they don't seem to have global coverage with Ku band, only being able to use it when in range of certain satellites. This surprises me because I would've expected there to be enough geostationary sats for one to be visible from anywhere in orbit and it can't be *that* expensive to buy bandwidth on several.)
http://blog.nexusuk.org