space station

tags: music video, Beethoven, moonlight sonata, NASA, space station, Astronaut Ed Lu, streaming video In this video, astronaut Ed Lu plays Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on board the International Space Station in 2003 (Video courtesy of NASA). I can't help but wonder what Beethoven would have thought about his music being performed in space. Was his music the first to be performed in space?
Earlier this year, I attended a "Star Party" at the MacDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, a venerable institution perched on a hill in the far west Texas desert. The skies out there are, understandably, crushingly big and so teeming with stars that the astronomers guiding the public stargazing events need to aim high-powered laser pointers at the sky in order for anyone to tell one star from another. On the evening of my attendance, our guide was giddy with the news that the International Space Station, formerly an invisible blip in the night sky, had recently been expanded to the point that…
tags: alka seltzer, microgravity, space science, NASA, streaming video Alka-Seltzer is added to spherical water drop in microgravity onboard the International Space Station on March 22, 2003. Expedition Six NASA ISS Science Officer Don Pettit performs a series of microgravity experiments with water spheres and effervescent antacid tablets. Pettit inserts a tablet into a 50-millimeter sphere and observes the fizzy results. [4:43]