Celebrating the Wonders of Technology

[thelerner]

We take technology for granted, but its an amazing achievement, created by dozens, hundreds, thousands of people working together with a common aim.   Creating something that is a little bit magical. 

 

15th year anniversary of the International Space Station: http://time.com/4094719/space-station-fifteen-years/

 

"You probably don’t remember what you were doing on Nov. 2, 2000, but astronaut Bill Shepherd and cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev likely do.

 

That was the day they climbed aboard the International Space Station (ISS), becoming its very first inhabitants—and beginning a streak for the station that reached 15 straight years of occupancy early Monday eastern time.

 

Shepherd, Gidzenko and Krikalev—who were aboard for four months—were members of what was known as the Expedition 1 crew. Last July 22, Expedition 45, including American astronaut Kjell Lindgren, cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui, took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to begin their own station stay.

 

In all, 220 people from 17 countries have lived aboard the ISS since 2000. During those 15 years, the station has made 87,600 revolutions of the Earth—give or take the odd leap day. Oh, and in case anyone’s counting, the crews have eaten approximately 26,500 meals—so far.

 

The ISS was little more than three pressurized modules, some supplies and a couple of solar wings to help keep it powered on the day the first crew climbed aboard. Today, the station is a flying piece of cosmic infrastructure the size of a football field, containing 15 pressurized modules, which afford the astronauts as much habitable space as a six-bedroom home. It weighs 1 million pounds (454,000 kg), runs on 3.3 million lines of software code and required 115 launches just to carry all of its components up to orbit.."

 

 

In a divided world its good to have something International, housing people, some of our best and brightest, from 17 different countries (at various times), living and working together.   A speck of humanity in the hostile vacuum of space. 

Edited November 15, 2015 by thelerner