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Return from outer-space LIKE A BOSS

Expedition 26 Soyuz Flight Engineer Oleg Skripochka.

It’s the Space Pope!

(via itsfullofstars)

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Aren’t those Mercury spacesuits just the classiest thing you’ve ever seen?

itsfullofstars:

Alan Shepard was the second person, and the first American, in space.

On May 5, 1961, Shepard piloted the Freedom 7 mission and became the second person, and the first American, to travel into space. He was launched by a Redstone rocket, and unlike Gagarin’s 108 minute orbital flight, Shepard stayed on a ballistic trajectory suborbital flight—a flight which carried him to an altitude of 116 statute miles and to a landing point 302 statute miles down the Atlantic Missile Range. Unlike Gagarin, whose flight was strictly automatic, Shepard had some control of Freedom 7, spacecraft attitude in particular. The launch, return from space and subsequent collection by helicopter were seen live on television by millions.

Source: Wikipedia.

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It’s true: we really are living in a science fiction novel. Astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson takes a look down at Earth from the International Space Station. (via APOD: 2010 November 15 - Home from Above)

Good reads: "The Cassandra Project," by Jack McDevitt →

There’s nothing like a little space-race nostalgia to keep hard SF interesting. In this story, the Apollo landings turn out to have been a hoax, but not the kind of hoax most conspiracy theorists talk about.

Good reads: "Lostronaut," by Jonathan Lethem →

Reading this review of Jonathan Lethem’s new novel Chronic City, I’m reminded of this circular short story that appeared in The New Yorker last fall.

Trapped in space with a rowdy, unreliable Russian crew after the Chinese deploy mines around her vessel, lost astronaut Janice writes a series of letters to her boyfriend, Chase, stuck back on Earth. As their situation becomes more desperate and Janice deals with the knowledge that she has cancer and is doomed anyway, whether help comes or not, her letters to Chase take on a mystical, dreamlike quality.

Chase himself is the main character of Chronic City, so Janice’s missives to him form a sort of side story to the novel. But by themselves, they’re a beautiful, dreamy meditation on longing, loss, and outer space.