Time running out for the International Space Station
Sometimes you read something you can't comprehend. This often happens to me but then I'm not the sharpest tool in the box.
But when I read that scientists were calling for the International Space Station (ISS) to not be brought down to Earth in 2015 I was amazed, befuddled and exasperated all at the same time.
What do you mean the station has only five years left?
Construction of the $160 billion station started in 1998 and is expected to be completed in 2011. So it's not even finished yet.
Yet under the plans but through by then US President George W Bush, the ISS is due to be 'deoribited' (doesn't sound good to me) by the middle of the decade.
This is just plain crazy - but it's not totally W's fault.
The end of the ISS was supposed to herald a brave new world of space exploration which would have seen a return to the Moon in the next decade and then boots on Mars within a generation.
Sounds great but NASA just ain't got the money and the Obama administration are busy tackling bigger problems.
Add to this the ISS being the most expensive object ever built and its sky-high running costs and you could understand why the money men would like to see it mothballed.
The head of the European Space Agency (ESA) has called for the International Space Station (ISS) to be kept in service until at least 2020.
"I am convinced that stopping the station in 2015 would be a mistake," Jean-Jacques Dordain told the BBC. "We cannot attract the best scientists if we are telling them today 'you are welcome on the space station but you'd better be quick'".
Here's some weird facts about the ISS:
While floating some 240 miles (390km) above Earth's surface, the space station has hosted a rotating international crew since November 2000.
The station boasts a mass of some 450 metric tons.
The First module was the Zarya functional cargo block launched in November 1998.
Participating countries are the United States, Japan, Canada, Russia and 11 European countries including France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and the dear old UK.
The ISS orbits around the Earth in a period of about 92 minutes. The number of orbits completed till date is more than the distance between Earth and Uranus.
It is visible to more than 90 per cent of the world's population.
The ISS encompasses 43,000 cubic feet of living and working space which is equal to the space inside two Boeings 747s.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
