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joe_haldeman
joe_haldeman
03 January 2013 @ 08:30 pm
Girls . . . in . . . SPACE!  

Phil Plait's "Bad Astronomy" blog has a fascinating personal tour of the ISS, 22 minutes of crawling around the cramped quarters with a good-natured and attractive female astronaut – I guess that's still the proper term, though the people in the ISS don't fly spaceships in the normal course of things.  The tour is wonderfully science-fictionally prosaic.  (People who've traveled in various parts of the world might not be surprised to know that the toilet section has an assortment of different kinds of toilet paper.  Rough for tough Russians and soft for effete Americans.)

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2012/12/15/space_station_tour_commander_sunita_williams_shows_you_her_orbiting_home.html

Joe

 
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nojaynojay on January 4th, 2013 02:02 pm (UTC)
The ISS has station-keeping thrusters used to boost its orbit occasionally as it's an unstreamlined conglomeration of parts in quite a low orbit (to permit Soyuz capsules to reach it). This means atmospheric drag is a problem hence the thrusters augmented by occasional ATV boosts and so it could well be described as a spaceship.

There are plans to put a VASIMR plasma motor on board the ISS sometime; it only has a few newtons of thrust powered from the solar cells and a battery pack but it can run for a long time with very little propellant and even use waste hydrogen from the air and water purification plants.
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