At Space.Com, they have two videos about the soon to land Curiosity probe on Mars, one narrated by William Shatner and the other narrated by Wil Weaton. They are very similar, so if you see either one, most of the major points are shown.
AND
It is scheduled to land at 5:31 UTC/GMT on August 6th (next Monday). Or about 1:31AM Eastern. Further proof that there are times when government can do cool things. Also another nail in the coffin of the stupid “You didn’t build that” meme. Since part of everyone’s taxes paid for this, please enjoy.
IMHO this is going to be better than Christmas morning. Woo Hoo!
Please share widely!
Shatner is all geek and stuff, but WHEATON…is teh awesome. Super-nerd!
you tool of a blog. ;-P~~~~~
HTML will work in the comment itself, but not in the title, for whatever reason.
I cry fowl! Foul! Chikin!
I have a special place in my heart for Spirit and Opportunity. When we were at the Kennedy Space Center, and I walked by the full scale models, I totally teared up. And we got to see the models of Curiosity. Wicked.
We also got to see one of the shuttles (damn, can’t remember which one) with its front end out getting cleaned so the whole thing can be delivered to its final resting place.
Total space geek moment. Loved it!
Neither of my trips to Florida allowed for time to go see the Kennedy Space Center. Some Day!
within the transition time…I suspect that in some ways, it’ll be a lot less super in the future with the shuttle program mothballed. We went just after the mothballing, so to speak. We even got a tour inside the 20 million story Vehicle Assembly Building O_o – something that had been spotty for some time (security reasons) and I’m not sure they’ll be going back to those once the shuttles are gone. Maybe they will but…no shuttles, just the model outside.
Eating lunch under a Saturn V rocket, though, was happy-bouncy-fangirl enough!! 😀 😀 😀 😀
In the sixties, during the Apollo program and before the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum was built, I remember full-sized rockets of the space program (Atlas, Titan, Saturn) on display outside on the the Smithsonian grounds. As I recall, it was a grassy area (I think there was an antique merry-go-round nearby) and the rockets were grouped together. No fences, no security guards, no fancy audio guides — just a bunch of great big rockets pointing skywards.
Meanwhile, the MD suburbs where I grew up had several Nike sites, each had big “golfball” radar domes.
For what it’s worth, the watch on your wrist has many times more compute power than ALL the computers in those great shots of mission control that we remember so well.
It’s no wonder I ended up being a programmer, I grew up loving that stuff.
Each time I got to see the shuttle sit on the launch pad as the weather was never quite good enough. It was stupid Discovery each time, too.