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

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.

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Our Place in the universe

Found this amazing photo also while stumbling. To those who might be confused, that little dot that is in that ray of light is our planet, Earth. This was taken by Voyager in 1990, and the presented by Carl Sagan of Cornell University in October 13, 1994, accompanied by this speech:

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

A Pale Blue Dot

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