But here is what I would have written:
What an incredible tragedy. America's 3 most beloved Astromascots are lost in the Louisiana bayou. We must spare no expense, much American taxpayer money will be expended, to find the three amigos, the three adorables. How could this have HAPpened, man !? Did some engineer screw up an English-to-Metric conversion ... again ?!!! :)
Three Unusual Astronauts Await Rescue in Louisiana Swamp
By Tony Hoffman
In a rescue effort being anxiously followed by space enthusiasts on Facebook and Twitter, searchers have spent the past four days trying to locate a capsule and its crew of three that parachuted from the edge of space into an alligator- and mosquito-infested marsh near the Louisiana-Texas border.
Fortunately, the crew of BTS-1 has the right stuff to endure the harsh conditions in that trackless wilderness, if anyone can. The mission's commander, Camilla Corona SDO, is a rubber chicken; the pilot, Fuzz Aldrin, is a teddy bear, and the mission specialist, Skye Bleu, is a stuffed pig.
Yes, you read that right. But we're not talking about just any rubber chicken, teddy bear, and stuffed pig here—these individuals are beloved emissaries of the organizations they represent. Camilla is the mascot of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which launched in February 2010, and a bit of a celebrity among space geeks, with over 2,400 Facebook friends and 1,600 Twitter followers. Fuzz Aldrin, who has more than 900 Facebook friends, represents Bears on Patrol, an organization that provides free teddy bears to police departments to help set young children at ease in police calls where they are involved. Skye Bleu is an emissary from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
The BTS-1 mission—for Balloon Transportation System, in the tradition of the Space Shuttle's STS (Space Transportation System) nomenclature—is a product of Bears on Patrol's Raise Awareness Space Balloon (RASB) program. As exemplified in the mission's slogan, Scientia Quod Pacis (Knowledge and Peace), th project is designed to promote the organization's mission of peace for children in troubled situations as well as to inspire interest in science and engineering among young people.
BTS-1, consisting of the crew capsule, dubbed Inspiration, lifted by a weather balloon, launched from the University of Houston at 11:08am last Sunday and flew eastward across Texas, propelled by the jet stream at up to 130mph. The balloon climbed to close to 100,000 feet at which point—as expected—it burst. The parachute carrying the Inspiration capsule then flew over Port Arthur, Texas crossed Sabine Lake into Louisiana and—after a journey of some 317 miles—came to rest in the marshlands of the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge.
The balloon carried a ham radio: A VHF handy-talkie equipped with APRS, a ham radio data systemthat allows information such as GPS data to be automatically sent, re-transmitted by automated stations (digipeaters), received and plotted online. The last known position was received when it was still in the air (255 feet above ground), so the exact landing site is unknown; searchers were able to directly hear the signal when relatively close to the site on Sunday before the radio's batteries were depleted. The landing site is not easily accessible; the nearest road is several miles away, so approaches have been made by water; rescuers are expected to use airboats in their next attempt Friday morning.
The BTS-1 mission has friends in very high places. As Inspiration glided 60,000 feet over Texas, the mission received a good-luck tweet from astronaut Ron Garan aboard the International Space Station (ISS), then flying over the Houston area some 200 miles above the balloon. Garan seemingly has a fondness for mascots; when he flew to the ISS aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on April 4, he carried with him a patch depicting the Space Tweep Society's "birdonaut" mascot, Meco. Camilla is popular among the astronauts—I've seen numerous pictures of her with them—I'd half expected that one of them would stow her away aboard a Shuttle flight. Failing that, I guess Camilla took the next best opportunity that came along.
I attended SDO's launch as a participant in a NASA tweetup that accompanied the event. I'd flown down two days early to watch the predawn launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour; the day after Endeavour's launch I tweeted that I was driving into Cocoa Beach for some downtime. To my surprise, I received a tweet (cluck?) from Camilla (who I'd just started following, knowing she was the SDO mission's mascot), inviting me to join her at the Starbucks in Cocoa Beach. According to my phone'sGPS, the Starbucks was in a hotel lobby that also housed a surf store and a bar. And so, I walked into a bar and told the bartender, "I'm looking for a rubber chicken…" Nonplussed, he pointed me to the bar's side entrance, which opened into Starbucks, where I met Camilla as well as her handler, Romeo Durscher, an SDO project scientist who's brought the rubber chicken to numerous space-related and educational events.
As to our intrepid balloonists, their fate remains unknown. Four days of searching has not turned up a trace of crew, capsule, or the bright orange parachute that returned them to Earth. Perhaps they're out there beyond the next hummock, enjoying the last of the cupcakes and chocolate that their launch crew is said to have packed for them. There's always the chance that they won't be found, and the names of Fuzz Aldrin, Camilla Corona SDO, and Skye Bleu may join Amelia Earhart in the ranks of aviation's missing immortals. But if this illustration released by the BTS-1 Recovery Team carries any weight, the crew may be trying to find its own way out of the bog, perhaps closing ranks and chanting "Skeeters and gators and hawks! [[Oink, squawk]] Skeeters and gators and hawks."
And the next day after I wrote this they were found! Here's the Press Conference:
And the next day after I wrote this they were found! Here's the Press Conference:
2 comments:
They call that an "upgrade".. sounds like the rubber band broke and no one had another.. Just tweeted this BTS crew post.. maybe you'll get some fresh faces hitting here...
Added the post-flight press conference. :-)
They were lost, and now they're found! :-)+-
Post a Comment