The Kid Should See This.
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There's just so much science, nature, music, art, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen. It's most likely not stuff that was made for them...
But we don't underestimate kids around here.
Kid-friendly not-made-for-kids videos for all! Collected by Rion Nakaya and her three four year old co-curator.
Tip Jar: Curating this blog takes work! If you like the videos on this site, please support the science education projects that we've picked on DonorsChoose.org.
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Early this morning at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, SpaceX launched the first ever private spacecraft — the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket — to the International Space Station on an unmanned mission to deliver food, clothes, other supplies, and science experiments to the astronauts who are currently stationed there. And this is only the first of 11 more planned flights to the space station. Incredible and historic!!!
And stay til the end of the video, where at around the 10m mark, Falcon 9 and Dragon go into orbit and we get to see Mission Control, and (eventually) some (relieved) high fives and hugs.
from NASA Television. (Updated with embed-capable video.)
From Science Friday, behold A Spacesuit Ballet:
Of the suit he wore on the moon, Neil Armstrong wrote, “it was tough, reliable, and almost cuddly.” But that cuddly suit, made by the company Playtex, had some stiff competition (literally) from rival rigid, metal designs. This video features archival NASA footage of mobility tests for several spacesuit prototypes. Music is from the band One Ring Zero’s album “Planets”.
Why do we explore? Simply, it is part of who we are, something we’ve done throughout history. NASA’s new video, “We Are the Explorers,” looks at that tradition of reaching for things just beyond our grasp, and how it’s helping lay the foundation for our greatest journeys ahead.
It looks like NASA took Reid Gower’s good advice about how to make more inspirational videos!
More than half a century of sending objects into space has left the Earth surrounded by junk. Bits of long-dead satellites, spent rocket stages and other debris orbit the planet at almost 18,000 mph, each chunk a potential hazard to working satellites or astronauts.
The Swiss have a plan, however. Scientists at the Swiss space centre at EPFL, the federal institute for technology in Lausanne, want to send a “janitor satellite” into orbit, to sweep up debris and permanently remove it from orbit.
The SFr10m (£7m) satellite, called CleanSpace One, could launch within five years, according to EPFL.
From guardian.co.uk.
On this day a half century ago, Mercury Astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. On the morning of February 20, 1962, an anxious nation watched as Glenn climbed into his cramped Friendship 7 space capsule and was propelled by an Atlas 6 rocket high above the atmosphere. He circled the Earth three times before re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean. As the veteran space program reporter John Noble Wilford wrote last week in The New York Times, “Perhaps no other spaceflight–all 4 hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds of it–has been followed by so many with such paralyzing apprehension.”
From OpenCulture.
In December 1972, Astronaut Harrison Schmitt sang “I was strolling on the Moon one day” while he strolled and skipped (and fell) on the moon with Commander Gene Cernan during the Apollo 17 mission. Schmitt was a geologist, an astronaut, a university professor, a former U.S. Senator from New Mexico, and the only scientist to have explored the Moon’s surface.
Very interesting side note: Commander Cernan has the honor of being the last man on the moon. Lucky fellas.
via BoingBoing.
This fly around of the International Space Station (ISS) is displayed in the “Moving Beyond Earth” exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Displayed as a 30ft x 18ft projection, the HD animation highlights the major components of the ISS. Video courtesy of NASA’s VR Lab.
Spacesuit History, some excellent photos from Spacesuits: The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Collection. Via How to Be a Retronaut.
Update: Some more great (sometimes larger) spacesuit photos taken in museums at HistoricSpacecraft.com.
