21st Century Stuff

It is very satisfying to finally see something that really, really belongs into the 21st century. If you haven't followed the developments at the International Space Station lately, here are a couple of things to meditate over:

• There are currently four spacecraft docked at the ISS: Three Russian Soyuz and a Japanese resupply vehicle.
• The ISS can now support a permanent presence of a crew of six, but when the Shuttle swings by, there have been up to thirteen people in the ISS at the same time.
• Over the next year, there will be five new modules that will be connected to the ISS.
• The ISS has now two robotic arms.

It is also nice to hear that NASA is now slowly moving away from the rather insane idea of the previous administration to de-orbit and throw away all of this investment just in time when it is finished in 2016. It looks like full use until 2020 is already being planned for, and from what the Russian experience with their previous hardware shows, thirty years of use is not impossible.