Remember half a century ago

Yuri Gagarin

50 years ago, as american astronauts were getting ready to take their first flight up there around the earth and several monkeys and other animals had been sent already (successfully or not), Yuri Gagarin became the first human to ever enter orbit on april 12th 1961.
He flew in a capsule named Vostok 1 at an average height of 250 km completing a full revolution around the Earth in one hour and 48 minutes.
Since then, 520 men and women from 38 countries went into space. They were carried by russian, american and since 2003, chinese vehicles (India should launch its first manned flight in 2015).


After his, other milestones have been passed, the first woman in space, 26 years old Valentina Tereshkova, flew on the Vostok 6 mission in 1963.
Then came the first men on the moon, Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins. They landed onboard Apollo 11 and spent for 2 hours and 30 minutes on the moon over a 195 hours long mission.
The Apollo 13 mission (1970), famous for Jim Lovell's "Houston, we've had a problem". Due to this incident (explosion in the oxygen tank) they did not land on the moon, but travelled around it, 248 655 miles away from Earth, farthest distance travelled away from our planet by a human.
When will we see the first human land on Mars? Maybe by 2030. Who will be the lucky chosen one?

Edwin Aldrin photographed by Neil Armstrong

Plugged

Wired 08/2010 issue

There is a lot to say about Wired, I subscribed to it while I was still living in France; it was a great way to practice my English. I read it in my own very special way (and I guess everyone has a different way to read it): at first, I just browse trough it, reading a most of the short articles, the test section, what can be read in a few minutes… Then I leave it for a few days, maybe a week or two and then come back to it and read the more interesting and longer articles, always about very different subjects..

However what I like the most is to choose a previous issue at random, and read it all.

Finally, while waiting for the next issue to come out, you can just go read on the website (Here), which is daily updated with great content, or on an IPad, on which you will have more or less what's in the monthly issue.

By the way, things I read on Wired might inspire a lot of the articles I will post.

Very Disco

Photo: NASA

This is it; Discovery, NASA’s oldest space shuttle, re-entered earth’s atmosphere for the last time on Wednesday march 9th. Over a 27-year career and 39 missions, it spent 365 days in space; it orbited almost 8,600 times, travelling about 150 million miles and it has carried 246 people into space.

These are a few noticeable achievements of Discovery:

- It is Discovery that took Hubble (yes, you know him, he’s the satellite who gave us hundreds of incredible pictures from space => Gallery) in 1990. It flew back to Hubble twice for service missions since then.

- John Glenn, the first American in space flew it in 1998 and became the oldest person to fly in space, at the age of 77.

- After Columbia’s tragic accident in 2003, discovery became the oldest shuttle in the fleet.

Photo: NASA

X Plane

This is a huge program; Basically allowing you to fly any plane anywhere in a very realistic world.

I tried it, downloading the free trial version (X Plane Download Centre), you have something like minutes of flight in a row, then you must restart it to continue (the actual program costs $29). It is not too hard to just begin with going up, down, left, right, but gets tricky if you want to go further in the little time you get.
You can also get it for your iPad, iPhone, Android in a simpler version.

The best thing about this program may be the “Plane maker” which allows you to build a plane, it includes choosing from what type of engine you want, including their full properties (max height, thrust…), to its shape.

Finally you can include it in X Plane in order to fly it. 

I’m sure I haven’t seen everything about this plane maker because I could barely understand what they asked on some pages, I just followed an online tutorial to make a “simple” plane (Click here to find it). I guess I’ll get to understand all these later, and I can’t wait to be able to virtually build my own plane and fly it!

This video, which is the trailer for the next version of X Plane (10), gives you a good idea of the possibilities of this simulator: