Space: The Final Frontier

Today is the 50th anniversary of the first human in space. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and completed an orbit around the Earth before returning to the ground about two hours later. Gagarin ejected from the Vostok capsule as planned, and a farmer and his daughter witnessed Gagarin as he arrived in their field by parachute. Gagarin says that he told them, “Don’t be afraid, I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!” Gagarin was not the first mammal in space, however. That distinction goes to Laika, a stray dog who the Soviet scientists chose because they felt she had already been trained for the rigors of space travel during her time on the streets of Moscow. Our CFO and COO Hapy Mayer named his dog Laika after this pioneer.

Today is also the 30th anniversary of the first Space Shuttle flight. The Space Shuttle Columbia launched from the Kennedy Space Center at precisely 7am EST and orbited Earth thirty-seven times over two days before landing at Edwards Air Force Base. This ability to land gently like an airplane, which allows the Shuttle to be re-used, was one of many technological leaps forward that were introduced in the Space Shuttle program. NASA describes this mission as The Boldest Test Flight in History because it was the first time a new spacecraft had been tested in space with people aboard: Commander John W. Young and pilot Robert Crippen. This description of the mission is almost certainly a reference to the opening of the television program Star Trek:

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Star Trek showcased many technologies that must have seemed incredibly futuristic at the time but have since become commonplace. One example of this is the video wall that Captain Kirk and his crew used to chat with Starfleet Command or Klingon ships. Today, this can be done with FaceTime from any Intel-based Mac, iPad 2, iPhone 4 or iPod touch (4G). Even the weapons technology Star Trek imagined is being realized: The United States Navy recently announced that it has successfully tested a solid-state high-energy laser at sea and used it to set a test boat on fire. We are still presumably many years away from teleporters and replicators, but I am anxiously awaiting their debut.

If you want to explore the stars, there’s an app for that. Star Chart works with the built-in compass on the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPad. This allows you to simply hold your device up to the sky and receive details about the stars, planets and galaxies in that direction. You can even point it down to get a virtual view through the Earth and see the celestial objects that are not visible here in the Northern Hemisphere. You can also see the sky on your iPhone if you have a telescope and the MX-1 Telescope Adapter for Apple iPhone. This device allows you to mount your iPhone camera onto the telescope’s eyepiece to take photos or video or even display the view in realtime, not accounting for the time it takes light to cross the vast distances of space (remember: the speed of light is not only a good idea, it’s the law).