Every now and then it's good to pause and really take in the mind-blowing Future Now! wonder of what the internet brings to us. The part of me that is still a wide-eyed 8 year old all-things-space-&-NASA-total- junkie was absolutely thrilled to discover that real live astronauts are on Twitter and posting photos they took on a space station orbiting this planet.
We take the space missions for granted now, but it is absolutely unbelievably fucking cool that we have an actual space station orbiting above us, visited by a (soon to be phased out) reusable space plane. Space tourism and permanent settlements on The Moon, and Mars, are not an if, but a When. And that When is within only another couple of decades.
There are 8 year old kids around today who, if they don't become astronauts themselves, will be able to take a Trip Of A Lifetime to The Moon, before they hit their 70s, and they won't have to be multi-millionaires in order to afford it.
If you'd told me at 8 years old that the above was a coming soon new reality, and that in a few decades I also wouldn't have to constantly, diligently, scan newspapers and magazines one or two grainy new photos every few months taken in space, via human or robot, because they would be freely available, by the tens of thousands, whenever I wanted to go and look at them online, I probably would have pissed my pants with delight.
But that is this reality now.
That was probably a way too long intro for this photo, but fuckit, I haven't ranted anywhere near enough on here lately.
Clayton C. Anderson was an astronaut on Expedition 15 to the International Space Station. Here's a beautiful photo he took over the 'World Resort', United Arab Emirates :
More Of Clayton C. Anderson's Photos Here
It's also very cool to learn that the Homer Simpson in space episode, Deep Space Homer, is in the DVD library on the international space shuttle.
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