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* CYBERSPACE *
* A biweekly column on net culture appearing *
* in the Toronto Sunday Sun *
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* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer *
* Free for online distribution *
* All Rights Reserved *
* Direct comments and questions to: *
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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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