People in Space
===============

Thursday 25 November 2010 15:35

Born in 1973 I just missed the Apollo era of moon
landings, but I was around on April 12 in 1981 for
the future that was the Space Shuttle. The Space
Shuttle is the iconic part of space flight of the
80s, with the local hero Wubbo thrusting interest
to insane levels.

So a couple of months ago I was a bit surprised I
didn't have a clue about what was actually
happening in space. Visually I could see Iridium
flares and the ISS pass regularly, but if there
were people on the ISS and how much I didn't know;
could be none or two dozen, both probably
uninteresting enough nowadays to not make the
headlines if it all just goes according to plan.
Frightened by this deterioration of interest in
such an interesting part of civilization I decided
to wipe of the dust and find out.

There is of course a site that answers questions
like "How many people are in space right now?":
http://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/.
Based on that I created a widget that displays the
information from that site and now I have that
information on my OS X Dashboard. And as part of
debugging that widget I closely follow anything
that has to do with getting people into space. Just
like in the 80s.

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/play/2010/11/25/people-in-space/