The project is like many of these projects, in that it has taken many years. It came out of the European space agency as a concept in 2015 - which means people had already been working on it for years. That's kinda amazing. Many of these folks will spend their career on just one program/mission.
I actually got to help with a satellite's math. It measures the fluctuation in Earth's gravity. I got to go see it launch and my name was inside it in magic marker from the only time I was ever allowed in the clean room. The radiation will have long since destroyed the ink, so I can't fly up and take a picture. That was a project assigned to me as a grad student. I made no money, not even a stipend. They did pay for the bus to take us down to launch. I think we had to cover our own food and lodging. I'm not sure, as that was a long, long time ago.
That's as close as I've come to space.
That's closer than I. My name has never left the surface more than in an airplane. Except when I left universe and was appointed the master of the universe. But I did not use a spacecraft
LOL We hit the fucker!
We'll be studying this for another decade. Well, they'll be studying it. I mean 'we' as in the global us. This is just the start. We shall see what happens!
I saw it zooming in. 14,000 miles an hour should knock it off course
(post is archived)