ISS astronaut, upon seeing the inside of the SpaceX Dragon capsule says “it looks like sci-fi”
André Kuipers, a Dutch physician and astronaut with the European Space Agency, was on board the ISS when the SpaceX Dragon vehicle berthed. He took this photograph, and wrote,
Inside of the Dragon module. Beautiful. Spacious, Modern. Blue LEDs. Feels a bit like a sci-fi filmset. Of course it is from Los Angeles.
He wrote more about the historic space milestone here, on his blog.
Last Friday was a special day on my mission. Don and I docked the SpaceX’s cargoship Dragon to the Space Station. Dragon brings new equipment for the crew. On the 31st of May it will return to Earth with supplies from the others and myself. The Dragon mission is the operational highlight of my mission. But it is also a milestone for international spaceflight. This is the first time that a commercial spacecraft has flown to the ISS and docked with the Station. You could say a new era of spaceflight has begun. Soon private companies will take people to and from space.
One clever teen solves Newton’s 300 year old riddle
Long before computer-driven physics simulations, trying to come up with a solution for a real-world physics problem took a tremendous amount of calculation by hand. Three hundred years ago, Isaac Newton asked if anyone could calculate the exact trajectory of a ball, taking into account both gravity and wind resistance. Recently, a 16 year old from India took that challenge and beat it.
