Is it a huge waste of funds to simply throw things into the air?

Friday, July 20, 2007

 



If you thought hoisting a giant banana above Texas was outrageous, you may indeed chuckle to learn that a 1,400-pound refrigerator-sized container of ammonia will be jettisoned from the International Space Station next week. On July 23rd, to be precise, Expedition 15 crew member Clayton Anderson will have the, um, privilege of heading outside in order to toss "two large hunks of unneeded equipment towards Earth," and once ejected, they will be tracked by NASA for an entire year until they finally begin to enter the atmosphere. Notably, officials are still not sure where the debris will land just yet, but if you happen to find your fridge replaced with a partially disintegrated (albeit similarly sized) container of fetid material in the next year or two, you'll know exactly what went awry.[Image courtesy of MSNBC]
'Refrigerator-sized' device to be heaved into space - Engadget



Now that is an interesting use of of NASA funding. If similarly sized objects usually burn in reentry, what kind of materials are they using for this particular cosmic refrigerator? And if it burned up in reentry, I hope the 1,400 pounds of ammonia don't do any damage to the ecosystem where they land. But who knows, this might lead to some interesting advancements in how we send things into space, and maybe a more enviromentally friendly one.

Blogged with Flock

0 comments: