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Tags: Twitter / Moon Landing / Apollo 11 / NASA / Virgin Galactic / → All Tags

NASA Celebrates Moon Landing, Twitter Followers and a Repaired Space Toilet

While Prez Obama was honoring the Apollo 11 crew in DC this morning on the 40th anniversary of the spaceship's lunar landing, the name Apollo 11 was rapidly becoming a Trending Topic on Twitter. We're sad to say that's not really a good thing as spammers have recently begun including Trending Topics and hashtags on their spam tweets so that they show up in Twitter searches. Oh the ups and downs of Twitter. Btw, have you heard of the hotel who took out a billboard ad to advertise their Twitter feed? Yeah. That's how insane Twitter is now.

Still, we looked to the all-knowing NASA Twitter page to see what they were tweeting about on one of their high holy days. And it turned out, today was a big day for NASA. Along with the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, NASA notched their 100,000th Twitter follower and they successfully completed a spacewalk to repair a toilet at the US Destiny Lab Space Station. Hurrah!

Meanwhile, hopeful space travel traveler, Virgin Galactic, is collecting songs for a playlist that will be played for passengers in space. Something tells us aspiring astronaut Lance Bass will want to be on both the Virgin Galactic launch and the playlist. VG: you can do better.

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Related Stories:
· Guinness Giving Away a 2012 Space Trip on Virgin Galactic [Jaunted]

Tags: Moon Landing Anniversary / Apollo 11 / Space Travel / Space Tourism / NASA / → All Tags

Follow Along With Apollo 11's Lunar Landing, 40 Years Ago Today

Forty years ago today, you could look up into the night sky at the moon and know that way up there, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were hopping around and generally making history as the first men to walk on the moon. Now that it's been four decades since that seminal moment of "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" and no one has walked on the moon since 1972, it's about time we look back and reflect on the physical and technological feats that were accomplished to bring this about.

Sure, there are tons of events this week in celebration, and Louis Vuitton threw an astronaut party last week, but the real action is at home on your computer. It's called "We Choose The Moon," and it's a flash website that effectively re-broadcasts the transmissions between Houston Command and Apollo 11 throughout their mission. Along with browsing historical photographs, the site allows you to follow along with a livestream, three Twitter accounts (@AP11_CapCom, @AP11_Spacecraft, and @AP11_Eagle), and a route map that progresses in real time with the mission as it was fourty years ago.

There's a lot of technical phrases, but also quips from the astronauts about dealing with lack of gravity and passing time in outer space, and the best part is that they're the actual transmissions! Since today is the day for the lunar landing and moonwalk, tune in or install the desktop widget to experience history all over again—we recommend forwarding it to your parents and grandparents who watched the original event on TV in 1969.

Related Stories:
· We Choose The Moon [Official Site]
· Apollo 40 Years, Event Schedule [NASA]
· Where to Celebrate The 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing [Jaunted]

[Photo: National Air and Space Museum]

Tags: Religious Travel / Art / NASA / Outer Space / → All Tags

Jesuits' Cosmos: Austrian Artists Install Massive NASA Mural in Vienna Church

Outer space is the perfect metaphor for God and the mysteries of life. It's infinitely vast, it's mysteriously unknowable, and it elicits wonder and contemplation in all who behold it. This might be why Austrian artists Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf installed a massive NASA photograph of an astronaut floating in space on the ceiling of the historic Jesuit Church in Vienna in an exhibit entitled The Jesuits' Cosmos. The photo, which will be on display through May 25, 2009, is printed on a huge section of semi-transparent net fabric. Employing a change in lighting, the curators can switch the focus between the astronaut and the curvature of the blue planet to a "reverted view" of the Andrea Pozzo ceiling frescoes above them. Either way, the viewer is awed with a sense of spatial illusion. I like this trend of installing thought-provoking pieces of modern art in houses of worship. It's a pleasant reminder that we're all on the same planet, just trying to get along and figure a few things out.

[Photo: Steinbrener-Dempf]

Related Stories:
· Jesuits' Cosmos [Steinbrener-Dempf]
· Vienna Jesuit Church [Official Site]
· Religious Travel Coverage [Jaunted]