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*                                                            *
*                         CYBERSPACE                         *
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         *
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   *
*                                                            *
* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer                                  *
* Free for online distribution                               *
* All Rights Reserved                                        *
* Direct comments and questions to:                          *
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*                                                            *
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The recent John Glenn shuttle mission (STS-85) has joined a 
handful of recent Real Life events that have brought parts of 
Virtual Reality to a screeching halt. NASA sites and other 
mirror sites covering the Glenn's launch were handling web 
requests at a rate not seen since the release of the Ken Starr 
report and the Mars Pathfinder landing.

Space and sex. Why am I surprised?

While its arguable that sex permeates media and is available at 
the click of a button or the flip of a page, space news tends 
to be ignored by mainstream media sources. As the Mars 
Pathfinder and Glenn web events demonstrate, a large and 
informed segment of the population is hungry for information 
space exploration. 

NASA's front end to its root site at www.nasa.gov is laid out 
in a webzine format, featuring NASA's leading story of the day 
and links to some of its current missions, like the space 
shuttle and the Deep Space 1 probe.

Next time they expand domain system, the powes that be should 
probably create a .nasa top level domain. We tend to think of 
the Kennedy Space center as the whole of NASA. NASA is actually 
comprised of dozens of facilities across the USA, from the 
Goddard Institute in New York to the White Sands Test Facility 
in New Mexico (when you want congress to authorize billions of 
dollars, spreading around the lucre is one way of getting 
senators in key states onside). Each of these facilities has 
its own web server serving up all sorts of interesting bits of 
news, research, technical data, and history. A list of NASA's 
various facilities can be found at 
www.nasa.gov/nasaorgs/index.html.

Most of the really sexy exploration stuff NASA does is hosted 
by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). JPL is responsible for 
missions like the Mars Pathfinder and the Jupiter-orbiting 
Galileo spacecraft. The JPL web site at www.jpl.nasa.gov 
provides megabytes of some of the most exciting images to be 
found on the net. The Galileo mission, which seemed to have 
been nearly ignored by the mainstream press, features two years 
worth of images of Jupiter and its more interesting moons like 
the volcanic Io and Europa's icy oceans, which may harbor life.

If you're really keen on browsing through images of space or 
you're looking for some cool Windows wallpaper, NASA has lumped 
them all together at the NASA Information Exchange site 
(nix.nasa.gov). You'll find images ranging from Apollo to its 
new generation of X Planes.

X Planes? The X Planes are NASA's future shuttle replacements 
scheduled for service in 1999. Yeah, that soon. They will 
service the International Space Station and, if you take NASA's 
word for it, provide lower cost payload delivery for commercial 
space ventures. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center provides 
details at its web page at www1.msfc.nasa.gov.

The space station itself is featured at station.nasa.gov. 
NASA's rather banal sounding Office of Space Flight at 
www.hq.nasa.gov/osf provides additional details about the space 
station. Available for download is a Microsoft PowerPoint slide 
show giving you an overview of the station's laborious piece-
by-piece assembly in space.

If you're really into some of the hard-core engineering behind 
rocketry or you just like looking at photos of massive columns 
of fire, the White Sands Test Facility at www.wstf.nasa.gov is 
sure to please. The home page of the Langley Research Center 
(www.larc.nasa.gov) also provides text and images detailing 
some of the advanced research going on in the world of space 
and aeronautical engineering.

NASA, while in the best position to bring you news on the space 
program, doesn't have a lock on it. The CNN site (cnn.com) has 
a section devoted to space news. Another good source is 
Jonathan's Space Report email list. You can subscribe to the 
list or preview it by pointing your browser to hea-
www.harvard.edu/QEDT/jcm/space/jsr/jsr.html.

If you're interested in actually visiting Florida's "space 
coast" and want the latest, the Florida Today website has 
information about upcoming launches, good vantage points, and 
points of interest at www.flatoday.com/space.

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