heres a bunch of sweet dudes talking about the future of humans in outer fucking space
TAM Panel - Our Future in Space from JREF on Vimeo.
heres a video of the first shuttle flight
and heres a picture of the last one, taken by my uncle as it flew from cape canaveral to Washington DC.
picture what it would feel like to be this guy, completely detached from anything else floating alone in the infinite vacuum of space.
this is a picture of planet Earth, the "pale blue dot" taken from voyager 1 as it passed pluto, marking the first time man's creations have left our own solar system.
the golden disc secured to voyager 1 and 2 designed to tell the "story" of earth to any beings that might find it drifting through the emptiness.
buzz aldrin, the second man on the moon, is a symbol of how far we have come as a species by leaving our planet for the first time, and how how far we can go.
this is the launch of the Kepler space telescope, march 6, 2009. since it entered orbit, the telescope has uncovered 54 planets in our galaxy that have the potential to sustain life. all of those have been found focusing on 1 small section of space, plus a planet can only be seen as it passes in front of its host star once a cycle. imagine what else is out there still yet to be seen.
i do not want this to turn into a political debate thread, but every year the US government spend almost 5 times developing nuclear weapons than they do funding space exploration. how can you not be curious about whats going on in our galaxy and beyond? we have absolutely no idea what incredible things we could find. there is so much to learn.
i fucking love space.