In Galileo and the Space Station, I wrote a whimsical blog entry about what Galileo would see if he pointed one of his early telescopes at the International Space Station (ISS) as it sailed overhead -- a mysterious moving sky object brighter than Venus. To review, this is what he would have seen:
But one of Galileo's later telescopes, providing a bit more magnification, would have shown something like the opening photo above, taken last Friday. (I achieved "a bit more magnification" by using David's camera with my telephoto lens. David's DSLR has a higher resolution than mine.)
It's really strange to think that there were five men inside as the ISS silently traversed the sky that night. Perhaps one of them was looking down on the lights of Portland as I took the photo. (FWIW, they were: Jeffrey Williams, Oleg Kotov, T.J. Creamer, Maxim Suraev and Soichi Noguchi.)
I will never get to be one of the few humans that travel into space. Well, unless someone gives me $200,000 for a ticket on Scaled Composites' SpaceShipTwo, which is anticipated to start space tourism flights in 2011. However, my kids or grandkids may get to travel into space. SpaceShipTwo flights are expected to come down to $20,000 as the volume increases, and there are several other space tourism competitors that could drive the price down significantly more. Someday, we may see something like this: "Grand Prize for the best essay: a trip into space!"
So who knows? I may get to see the day where a family member crosses the Kármán Line. :-)
