Twitter beams down from Space

Airport news for Travel on 08/02/2010.

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NASA has been in the news a lot lately as astronauts have recently been using Twitter to send messages and photos from space. This is the first time that astronauts have been able to communicate directly with people while in space, as prior to this they were forced to send messages to a third party who would then send them out as emails. Now NASA is planning to take part in a space launch that will involve an astronaut from the United Kingdom, as well as five others. Nicholas Patrick will join five of his colleagues on the Space Shuttle Endeavor for a two week space mission. The crew has been studying up on procedures and doing exercises recently at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The main goal of the mission is to attach the Tranquility crew module to the one hundred billion dollar ISS. Dr. Patrick will be going on three spacewalks to achieve the task which will bring the ISS very close to completion. After Patrick and fellow spacewalker Robert Behnken attach the fifteen ton module, astronauts will have the world's first multi-window space viewing chamber, also known as a cupola, which will give the astronauts a three hundred and sixty degree view of the world. This flight is carrying on despite the announcement last week by American president Barack Obama in which he said that all human spaceflight would halt, even though the U.S. currently has about nine billion dollars wrapped up in the program that will be lost.

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