ATV4 - better than the Space Shuttle?
Two years since my last post, but the theme is the same: the ISS. Last week I was lucky enough to see not just the ISS on its usual trajectory, but the brand spanking new Automated Transfer Vehicle 4 (The Albert Einstein) on its mission to resupply the ISS.
I found this exciting - much harder to spot than the ISS, so there is a certain thrill just in succeeding in seeing it with the naked eye, and from the centre of light-polluted Brighton, but also a new space vehicle, and a European one as well.
But yesterday I realised that three Chinese Taikonauts had just returned from a week long mission to the Tiangong-1 space module. Equally, if not more thrilling, perhaps? So why is it that I have never made any concerted attempt to see the Chinese space programme in action? I think I am still slightly in thrall to the late 1960s version of space exploration generated by NASA.
Lichtenberg said: 'Our inability to learn in later years is connected with our unwillingness to take orders in later years, and is so very closely.' Waste Book K ยง24, 1793-1796
I found this exciting - much harder to spot than the ISS, so there is a certain thrill just in succeeding in seeing it with the naked eye, and from the centre of light-polluted Brighton, but also a new space vehicle, and a European one as well.
But yesterday I realised that three Chinese Taikonauts had just returned from a week long mission to the Tiangong-1 space module. Equally, if not more thrilling, perhaps? So why is it that I have never made any concerted attempt to see the Chinese space programme in action? I think I am still slightly in thrall to the late 1960s version of space exploration generated by NASA.
Lichtenberg said: 'Our inability to learn in later years is connected with our unwillingness to take orders in later years, and is so very closely.' Waste Book K ยง24, 1793-1796
posted by Mark @ 2:23 pm
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