Group items tagged

capsule

blasted off from a floating platform in the Baltic Sea

The flight was designed to see how well the LES

Launch Escape System (LES

various parachutes would work in the event of a serious launch mishap

results were a bit mixed,

LES spinning out of control and cutting Beautiful Betty loose at an altitude too low for the capsule's parachutes to deploy properly. Betty slammed hard into the ocean

Still, the

was pleased.

The ultimate goal

, is to launch people into suborbital space on the cheap

The group relies on private donations and money from sponsors to fund its activities.

working fulltime to develop a series of suborbital space vehicles — designed to pave the way for manned spaceflight on a micro size spacecraft

you can go into the facility, you can go into some of the large areas there, like the Vehicle Assembly Building. You can go down to the launch pad and actually go up several floors of the launch pad and see where the astronauts would walk and where they would go as they were boarding the shuttle

actually got to take a snapshot of these structures and these systems in place before all those transitions happened

Many of those facilities are going to be decommissioned or converted to different uses

So the opportunity to kind of capture that moment in Street View and preserve it, and make it accessible to people around the world, is I think really valuable and important

If you want to

see a satellite image of the entire planet, there are

weather satellites

NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) release images of an entire hemisphere of planet Earth every 3 hours

you can see major weather patterns affecting parts of the Earth. But you really can’t see any specific spot on Earth with any detail

these satellite views is that they’re live.

The weather systems

are happening on the planet right now

If you don’t want a live view

check out

images produced by NASA. Here’s a composite photograph that shows the Earth’s Western Hemisphere, and here’s a view of the Earth’s Eastern Hemisphere.

There were also some amazing new satellite images of the Earth released from the European Space Agency’s 3rd generation Meteosat spacecraft

zoom in, and see some pictures of houses from space

Google Maps and the other internet mapping services are really just customers for the satellite services that actually take these photographs from space

There are a few major services on the market, including GeoEye

DigitalGlobe and Spot Image.

Each company has a fleet of Earth observation satellites, with a capability of resolving features on the surface of the Earth as small as about 45 cm (18 inches). In other words, an object 45 centimeters across would appear as a single pixel in their photographs

GeoEye – 5 satellites: IKONOS, OrbView-2, OrbView-3, GeoEye-1, GeoEye-2 (in 2013).

DigitalGlobe – 4 satellites: Early Bird 1, Quickbird, WorldView-1, Worldview-2

Spot Image – 2 satellites: Spot 4, Spot 5

Each of these services allow customers to purchase satellite imagery directly

the prices are

hundreds or even thousands of dollars for satellite imagery

typically can’t buy directly from the satellite company itself

All of the free satellite images you’re accessing were captured by various spacecraft over the last couple of years

. A live satellite view of your house, is still a few years off.

you can access a live broadcast from NASA’s International Space Station. About 40% of the time, if you follow this link you can see a live view of Earth from the space station.

Another service called Urthecast will be attaching a high definition camera to the International Space Station in 2013 to broadcast a live view of Earth from space.