Space Shuttle, Meet Space Station: A Docking Fit for Kubrick (or Ephron)
Posted by Alex_Pasternack on Wednesday, Feb 17, 2010
When the Shuttle Endeavor approached the Space Station last week, both snapped some breathtaking photos of their on-again-off-again dock-buddy. It was kinda like that great ’don’t cry!’ ending of You’ve Got Seattle, or whatever it was, when Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks find each other in the park, and Judy Garland sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and we’re just covered in tears.
Except these two were 300 miles above Central Park, sidling up next to each other at speeds over 17,000 miles per hour.
Of course, Lucas or Kubrick are the more obvious references for this spectacular mating choreography, especially given the space station’s new Millennium Falcon window. But you just can’t beat Meg Hanks scenes for emotional power.
In any case, somewhere over the rainbow, the Space Shuttle’s approach toward the ISS also offered a nice portrait of our atmosphere. As a couple of NASA astronomers explain, the mesosphere looks blue in the photo, the white layer is the stratosphere, and the orange layer is Earth’s Troposphere.
From the other direction, the space station looked so crisp and amazing it inspired a bout of hyperreality for one astronaut. “We’ve seen so many beautiful photographs of the space station,” Endeavour’s Kay Hire said early Saturday. “But to see it for real, especially as we approached in our rendezvous it is just beyond description. It’s just so sharp. Very high-def.”
Love it: though she saw the Space Station “for real” it was hard to distinguish the sight of that $50 billion floating mansion from an HD movie. Also amazing: how good the International Space Station has gotten at its Tom Hanks impersonation. Bravo!
Filed under:
About the author
Email: alexp at motherboard dot tv. @pasternack,
