Item The First: That was an interesting little exercise out at the ISS yesterday! In case you missed it, a spacewalk scheduled for six and a half hours got cut short after a little more than an hour due to a dangerous condition with one of the space suits. The suit worn by Italian/ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano started to leak water (probably the water used for cooling, but too early to be sure yet) inside of his helmet.
The problem is that water in microgravity doesn’t act like water here on the ground – see this video and this video for recent demonstrations from Chris Hadfield of how water acts on ISS. Loose water tends to float around, clump into balls, and cling through surface tension to surfaces.
Surfaces like your face. Since you’re in a space suit in the vacuum of space, you can’t just wipe the water off. So the water will spread over your head and face. And fill your ears – which left Luca almost completely unable to hear his radio. And fill your eyes – which left Luca almost completely unable to see. And cover the inside of the face plate – which meant that even what he could see out of his eyes was blurred by the water on the helmet glass.
By the time they had recognized the problem, aborted the spacewalk, and got Luca back into the airlock, they had a couple of reports that the water was getting into his nose and mouth. They later reported that there had not been a significant amount of water (YET!) there, but did admit at a press conference that if the problem had gotten worse without getting him inside and the helmet off, drowning could have been a possibility.
Do you still think that space travel is boring and routine just because we’ve gotten pretty good at doing a nearly impossible thing? Think again. It’s not that space travel is ever going to be easy or routine. It’s just that the people we have doing it are really, really good.
Item The Second: I ranted a while back about the freakin’ idiots at the AQMD wanting to shut down the beach fire pits because of the “air pollution” they cause while I wondered about how much pollution there could possibly be, especially compared to the regular brush fires we get here.
On July 12th they voted and put restrictions into place. It’s not a total ban, but it still seems to be another idiot rule by idiot bureaucrats and idiot politicians who then have the gall to wonder why we think they’re freakin’ idiots (if they ever bother to think what the general public thinks about them in the first place).
Item The Third: In better news, after I wrote about the impending closure of the the Military Aviation Museum in Virginia Beach, I got a nice email from David Hunt, the Director of the Military Aviation Museum. He gave me an update and a link to a follow-up article, indicating that things aren’t quite as grim as first indicated. While the museum will be looking to sell a couple of its aircraft in order to raise some capital, there are no immediate plans to sell the entire collection, close the museum, or shut down the airport.
Great news! Still, if you’re in the mid-Atlantic area and you’ve got an afternoon (or a day) free and you like airplanes, go give them a visit! Tell the docents how great they are! Tell David I sent you! Buy some stuff from the gift shop to help out, they’ve got some great warbird Hawaiian shirts!
Item The Fourth: With a “like” by Otrazhenie on Tuesday’s Sacramento Roses post, WordPress now tells me that I’ve gotten 100 “likes” since I started WLTSTF. After three more people hit the “follow” button last night, there are now thirty-seven people following WLTSTF, and I think only three or four of you are folks I actually know.
I have no way of knowing if that’s good, bad, or otherwise, but it pleases me greatly just on general principles. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who read WLTSTF and take the time to comment, hit the “like” and/or “follow” buttons, make a Facebook comment, or otherwise participate.
I would probably continue to blather on just to hear myself think (and to get in some steady writing practice, which was the original reason for “draining the swamp”), but it’s ever so much more fun when it’s a dialogue rather than a monologue.
Item The Fifth: There was a quiz in Spanish class on Monday, as expected. I got 13/15, The Long-Suffering Wife got 12/15, which was great considering that she had missed class the previous work due to a work commitment. We also got to do the “Paul & Ronnie: A Cute Couple” show and further established ourselves as the class clowns. We also established that “It’s not easy being Pablo”.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 