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.