The Space Shuttle mission which just undocked from the International Space Station, STS-131, has beamed down from orbit some great photos of astronauts in space. This is a wonderful chance for us stuck planetside to remind ourselves that we have people living and working in spaceships!
And, of course, this mission is historic for having the largest number of women simultaneously in space – four out of the thirteen total crew. Considering small-number statistics, that is pretty close to a fifty-fifty split! Here is the orbiting Bay Stater, Stephanie Wilson:
And here’s JAXA’s Naoko Yamazaki in the Destiny laboratory at a robotics console made of lots of ThinkPads taped to the ISS wall,
although I think this is my favorite picture of Yamazaki!
That’s where JAXA astronaut Soich Noguchi has been taking and Twittering down amazing Earth-observation and Space Station photos. (That is the single best application of Twitter I have ever seen, and is not likely to be surpassed, ever.)
Finally, I will leave you with astronaut family dinner!
Gee, I would have thought you’d want our astronauts to break 28,000 kph. They need a lot more than that to get BEO, after all! š
And I’d probably have to agree that Soichi Noguchi has achieved the best use of Twitter ever. All of us following him hope that future Expedition Crew members step up and go above and beyond like he has!