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This will be the last shuttle launch in 2009. Then we will only have five more launches:

• STS-130 Endeavour: ISS assembly flight 20A: Node 3 and Cupola. February 4, 2010
• STS-131 Discovery: ISS assembly flight Utility and Logistics Flight 4: Multi-Purpose Logistics Module Leonardo. March 18, 2010
• STS-132 Atlantis: ISS assembly flight 19A: Mini-Research Module 1. Final planned flight of Atlantis. May 14, 2010
• STS-134 Endeavour: ISS assembly flight ULF6, ELC 4, ROEU, Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Final planned flight of Endeavour. July 29, 2010
• STS-133 Discovery: ISS assembly flight ULF5, MPLM Leonardo, (to be left pemanently attached), ELC 3. Final flight of Discovery. Final Shuttle flight of the program. September 16, 2010.

All good (and bad) things have to end one day. It will be sad to see the last flight of the old space beasts from the Reagan Era. [NASA]

Here are ten machines that are so enormous that they'll screw with your sense of what's large, what's small, and what is truly gigantic—each handily put into scale.

A fair bit longer than the Eiffel Tower laid flat, is how big. [DarkRoasted Blend]

The Komatsu 9xx Series mining trucks look a bit like Tonka toys. No, they look exactly like Tonka toys. [MiningTopNews]

24-foot-tall Tonka toys, mind you. [E-Transport.ro]

Howard Hughes' ill-conceived, ill-fated Spruce Goose has always been fascinating to me. HAY GUYS, LET'S MAKE A PLANE OUT OF WOOD! WHAT COULD GO WRONG? [Colorado U]

Along with being a hugely strange idea, it was hugely huge. That's the 1019-ft Queen Mary cruise ship, for reference. [DriveArchive]

The Bagger 288 strip-mining machine has gained plenty of notoriety on the internet, mainly on account of looking like it was designed to kill. It isn't, at all, but you can't fault us for jumping to conclusions. Look at it! [DRB]

The general public's unease about this horror machine won't be helped by the fact that it's large enough to saw large ships in half, and gobble up a bulldozer without so much as flinching. [Wikimedia]

Old Soviet military hardware is incredibly interesting—a vestige of a time when both of the world's superpowers applied their distinctively different philosophies to a race to design some of the most ridiculous machines ever created. But surely this photo of a Typhoon Class submarine is just the victim of some zoom lens distortion, right? [DGIBNET]

Ha ha, not at all. Those there are humans, see? [Webpark.ru]

The Space Shuttle Conveyor is a literally-named, track-driven machine that you've probably seen before, saddled with one of NASA's various, now-dormant spacecraft. But it's hard to even judge how big the shuttle is, much less its ride. [NASA]

As you probably guessed, it's inconceivably gigantic.

The B-2 Bomber is another familiar piece of hardware, but one that is usually pictured without comparison, flying through the air, looking secretive. It's a stealth plane, and it's shaped like a Styrofoam glider, so I always imagined it as fairly lithe. [Af.mil]

It's actually startlingly large, with a wingspan of over 172ft. [OklahomaCity on Flickr]

Anyone with knowledge of power generation can tell you that it's no wimpy windmill that can pump out six megawatts of power, and that this windmill must be fairly substantial.

Whether they'll be able to find the words to fully describe how substantial it is is another matter entirely. Those orange specks peeking out of the fan's face like insects? Those are maintenance workers. [Giz]

At first glance the Knock Nevis supertanker, with its weird name and goofy-large "No Smoking" sign below the officer's deck, looks like your average cargo ship: Pretty big, pretty flat and and pretty boring. [Wikimedia]

Far from it: The largest ship in the world, measuring in at over 1,500 feet long, ole' Nevis is a floating city. [DamnCoolPics]

The Mil Mi-26 is one of the classic sense-of-scale killers, since its proportions are almost exactly like a regular helicopter, just bigger. How much bigger? [Wikimedia]

That little black thing hanging from the Mi-26's hook there is a Chinook, which is nearly a hundred feet long. [Aerospaceweb]

Worse still, it may be clogged, although not with the kind of stuff you'd think. Nay, no plunger will help in this case, as the clog is chemical in nature, and may have seeped into the figurative space station woodwork.

Unfortunately, mission control and the astronauts have few leads into why the multi-million dollar Russian-built space john crapped the bed for a second time in the past two years. Previously, the toilet was so crippled by whatever it was the astronauts were eating up there that the fix required an emergency replacement pump delivery from space shuttle Discovery.

For now, the 13 crew members on board have to split their number one's and two's between the remaining ISS toilet and one aboard the shuttle. If another toilet fails, the crew can fall back on Apollo-era waste collection bag, which is nice because we're currently celebrating that mission's 40th anniversary. [BBC]

Barring its mildly inauspicious start, the mission appears to have gone well so far, netting us stunning photos, fascinating live video of the repairs, and of course, years and years of mind-boggling Hubble imagery to look forward to.

One thing: NASA's aggressive, wide new online strategy has been great, and given regular people previously unimaginable levels of information and engagement with the program, but some things are best left unadvertised. Ahem:

Atlantis' crew woke up this morning at 4:31 a.m. EDT to "Lie in Our Graves" performed by the Dave Matthews Band. It was played for astronaut Megan McArthur.

Not that a frumpy musical choice could put a ding in the astronauts' unassailable coolness, but early morning orbital jam band sessions seem like they should be kept private, away from the wide, judgmental eyes of the next generation of potential astronauts. [NASA]

Shot just after launch, the image shows the faraway scene as viewed through a Takahashi TOA-130 refractor telescope (focal length 2200mm) and a Baader solar prism, which gives the Sun its muted look. Strapped to the back of the telescope, the 5D was set to ISO 100 and a 1/8000 shutter speed, the camera's extreme low and high settings, respectively [Edit: woops, the Mk II actually does ISO 50]. Legault used the free online Celestial Observer tool to calculate the best time to shoot from his location. Meanwhile, that little silhouette is the scene of an incredibly complex and dangerous Hubble rescue mission, which will repair a number of the craft's instruments, install a new camera and ensure that NASA's flagship orbital telescope keeps sending us amazing images for years to come.

Check out the unbelievable uncropped photos at Legault's site. —Note: It should be obvious, but don't try anything like this unless you know exactly what you're doing. Your eyes, they will burn. [Thierry Legault via Daily Mail]

The scar, spotted during a standard survey of the shuttle's heat shields, was described by NASA as "appear[ing] very minor", and occurred at a very early stage of the launch. Similar damage cast a pall over a space shuttle Endeavor mission in 2007, though repairs—Hollywood-style or otherwise—probably won't be necessary.

The astronauts will just have to put this out of mind while they carry out their ridiculously difficult Hubble repair mission, but it certainly won't make their reentry and landing, scheduled for about 10 days from now, any less stressful. [Daily Mail, Images courtesy of AP]

Has anyone had sex in space? To date, I can tell you emphatically, no. Why am I so sure? It's simple. Guys are guys. If a guy had sex in space, he would not be able to stand not bragging about it. Am I right, or am I right? Sorry to disappoint you, but there it is. We would all know about it. Or, I should say, we will all know about it when it happens.

So, what's the deal? Do we have blow up dolls or robots to take care of business? No, and not that we'd really want such a thing! Humans look a lot better.

Besides, would sex in space—bragging rights aside—really be so great? This week, I've given you a look at the difficulties of doing things in microgravity, and the potential for making some pretty disgusting messes. So, apply all you've learned, and honestly assess whether or not sex would be better up there. You'd have to anchor yourselves, somehow (in all six degrees of freedom), otherwise it would be more than the headboard you might bang up against. And, some objects, while not sharp (we are careful about that), might really hurt to run into during a moment of passion!

So what do we have? What do you think? There is a rule that even alcohol (for drinking) is not allowed onboard, because NASA is worried about bad PR. Can you imagine NASA wanting to address the issue of sex? Ha!

What about the future, as we fly longer and farther into space? That's easy. Crews are already mixed, and crews will become larger. As this happens, there will be a gradual transition from crew to colony (for example, a permanent moon base). Just like in your office now, romances will sprout (which the participants will think are secret) and things will take their natural course.

And, people back on Earth (the guy's friends) will hear about it, almost immediately after it happens. The news will quickly spread from there. And then, you'll know.

People are people, even in space!

Check out astronaut Leroy Chiao's previous illuminating, insightful columns, a centerpiece to our weeklong celebration of human life in space, "Get Me Off This Rock". If you love Leroy as much as we do, you can book him to speak at your business or school, by reaching him at the Leading Authorities Speakers Bureau.

So how did everything taste? On the whole, surprisingly good! But before we delve into our detailed taste test, a word about what we were eating. I spoke to Vickie Kloeris, the Subsystem Manager for Shuttle and ISS Food Systems—NASA's head chef—and she walked me through exactly what goes into the vittles consumed in orbit by our astronauts.

Essentially, NASA does exactly what the army does with its MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), with a few exceptions: MREs are designed to keep an 18- to 22-year-old, extremely active soldier fueled and ready, whereas space food must be nutritionally tailored to older and less-active adults, so in general, space food is lower in fat, calories and salt.

For space food, the main criteria are spoilage resistance, easy preparation and consumption in microgravity (ie no potato chips), plus storage-space considerations. There are five classifications of space foods: rehydrateable (just add water), thermostabilized (already wet, heat in its metallic/plastic pouch and eat), irradiated (cooked irradiated meats ready to eat), intermediate moisture (meaning dried fruits, jerky, and such) and natural form (better known as junk food—ready to eat without any prep or storage concerns).

On the Space Station, there is a food prep area in the Russian half that has a fold-down dining table along with food package heaters. But soon, as the station is expanded to accommodate a crew of six later this month, a second, smaller food prep area will be added—this time equipped with a chiller, which is a first for the station—refrigeration specifically for food products. Cold drinks in space!

Vickie was kind enough to ship out a batch of goodies that didn't make it into orbit from the last ISS mission, and we dined on them for lunch. We didn't have a specialized thermostabilized pouch heater—and you can't microwave these puppies—so we just dunked them in boiling water for a while until they heated through. We made it through six courses including dessert:

Here, our menu in detail:

First Course: Southwestern Corn, Potato Medley
While it may have looked a little rough in the thermostabilized packet, corn was actually pretty tasty, and had the correct consistency. The Southwest was apparently represented by flecks of red and green pepper and a mild spiciness.

But the potato medley—oh the potato medley. Don't know what to say—there was a really strange chemical bitterness, from where it came I do not know. But not good.
Rating: Two Stars

Second Course: Breakfast Sausage Links, Curry Sauce w/ Vegetables
Awesome. Fingering pork sausage links inside a packet is not super pleasant, let me tell you, but out of the packet they were perfectly edible—fairly salty and a little stringy and dry, but with good taste. And dipped in the curry sauce? Yes. Sausages and curry go incredibly well together here on earth, and in space it's no different.
Rating: Four Stars

Third Course: Beef Enchiladas, Baked Beans, Tortillas
Wow. Delicious. As the busted enchiladas slid out of the packet, we were scared. But the flavor was right on—equal to if not better than any frozen enchilada you can get at the store. And the baked beans—oh my—Adam had three helpings. Taste was great, consistency perfect—and wrapped in a tortilla, which Kloeris says is one of the most versatile space foods (understandable), the combination was fantastic. I could fuel my spacewalks with this combo for months.
Rating: Five Stars

Fourth Course: Chicken Teriyaki, Creamed Spinach
Yikes. As you saw in the video, the chicken teriyaki was nasty. I don't know if we got a bad pouch or what, but the chicken was mushy to the point of being hardly recognizable as chicken. And the smell. Oh the smell. Not sure what went wrong here, but this was more akin to dog food than teriyaki. AVOID!

As for the creamed spinach, that was our only freeze-dried food item. In space, you would use the small tube opening to inject hot water with a syringe and smush it around in the package until it was done, but we reconstituted it in a bowl, and it came out alright. Kind of bland, but edible. We didn't spend long on it though because we wanted that chicken teriyaki out of our sight as soon as possible.
Rating: Zero Stars

Fifth Course: Chicken w/ Peanut Sauce, Green Beans w/ Potatoes
Definitely an improvement. The chicken here was in more recognizable texture and shape, and the peanut sauce, while not particularly delicious, was certainly more edible than the teriyaki sauce. And the green beans and potatoes were pretty much the same as your typical canned fare, so not bad at all.
Rating: Three stars

Dessert: Brownies, Cocoa, Kona Coffee
The brownies were basically Little Debbie brownies—in fact, they may have been exactly that, as NASA does purchase off-the-shelf snacks to send up after they're evaluated and repackaged. And the drinks were essentially the same as their earthly equivalents—only in space, you rehydrate with the same syringe-in-bag technique. Both were tasty.
Rating: Four Stars

You may be surprised to see no freeze-dried ice cream here for dessert—the item most commonly associated with "space food." Well, that's because actual freeze-dried ice cream was only eaten on one Apollo mission—its flavor is just too unlike ice cream to be enjoyed, and its excessive crumbliness made it especially difficult to eat and clean up in microgravity. Thus, its relegation to museum gift shops and novelty stores everywhere.

So in conclusion, I'd say our lunch was highly enjoyable. We went through what every astronaut does before their missions—a sampling of the available foods to see what they like. If Adam and I were going up, you can guess our containers would be full of beef enchiladas, baked beans, sausages and curry sauce, and there wouldn't be any chicken teriyaki in sight.

Now I want to try everything on the menu:

I remember watching the very first Space Shuttle launch ever, in April 1981. We were sitting on the floor in the hallway of my school, gathered around a little TV that had been brought out for the purpose. It was amazing, the way the four-piece futureship—the Columbia with its then-all-white fuel tank and boosters—ripped through the sky, rotating and tilting a bit towards the earth as it reached escape velocity, as if to ensure all spectators would get sweaty palms and an elevated heart rate.

For five years, the Shuttle was the thing, and every kid worshiped it. By 1986, my friend Clint and I had finally ditched plans to become doctors like our dads, and were firmly set on joining the astronaut program when we were old enough. (This is before we decided to be rock musicians, which is what Clint actually is.) Space Camp had been started at Huntsville's US Space and Rocket Center in 1982, and was picking up a rep as a healthy, educational kids summer activity, so it wasn't hard for Clint and I to convince our parents to sign us up.

But before we made it to Space Camp, something happened that made a lot of kids think twice about becoming astronauts.

On January 28th, everyone at my school was gathered around a TV again, this time in the gymnasium. The Space Shuttle Challenger was about to send a teacher, Christa McAuliffe, into space, so it was a big deal. At the end of the countdown, we watched as the whole launch system lifted off of the gantry, until a little over a minute into the flight, when something went horribly wrong. The Challenger broke apart, exploding in all different directions in a nasty swirl of hot smoke. I don't remember if anyone cried, but I do remember the feeling of utter emptiness, helplessness, in my gut as I watched.

We coped with our grief through the spring, with jokes like "What does NASA stand for? Need Another Seven Astronauts" and "How do you know Christa McAuliffe had dandruff? They found her head and shoulders on the beach." Every kid lamented out loud that if they were going to have to pick a teacher to go on that particular ill-fated mission, why didn't they pick mine. The humor was just a stage of mourning; we all loved our Space Shuttle. But the tragedy, and the fact that the Shuttle was grounded until further notice, made it a strange time to want to go to Space Camp.

It was also a strange time to release a film about Space Camp—and accidental shuttle launches—but that summer, before Clint and I arrived in Huntsville, that movie starring Lea Thompson and a young Joaquin Phoenix came out. We all saw it. Much of it was shot on the campus, though somehow, through movie magic, Huntsville became a suburb of Cape Canaveral. So when we got there, we knew sorta what to expect.

After bidding goodbye to our parents for the week, we were divided into groups, named after astral bodies, and issued visors. My team was the Sun—we had orange visors, and in true nerd form, referred to ourselves the Solarians. There were like eight of us, Clint and me, plus these cool guys from South Carolina named Sean and Comer (seriously, how can you not be cool with a name like "Comer"?), a couple of other geeks and two girls—bookworm types but hey, they still counted. We went to classes together: NASA trivia on Apple IIe's with monochrome monitors, piece-by-piece walkthroughs of Mercury and Apollo capsules, demonstrations of rocket engines, even a spacesuit try-on.

In Space Camp: The Movie, there's a piece of equipment made up of three rings attached to each other at different points, so that the human body in the middle could be spun in every direction. In the movie, it's controlled with a stick, and whoever can use that stick to stabilize the machine technically has the skill to right a spacecraft that's tumbling into the earth's atmosphere during re-entry. Remember that thing? Well, it was 89% bullshit. The device existed, and a lucky few (I'm thinking the older kids) got to be strapped into it, but it's just an orientation trainer, and has no stick, and can't be controlled, except by spotters who spin it around manually.

The pool was for drills. The older kids in "Space Academy" got to do full spacewalk drills under water, like real astronauts do, with suits and everything. We youngins got some basic zero-buoyancy training. The most fun we had was emergency drills—a low-budget re-enactment of the scene where Gus Grissom is pulled out of the water in The Right Stuff.

Looking back, Space Camp was largely an opportunity for the US Space and Rocket Center to sell a bunch of crap (t-shirts, pins, flight suits, hats) and promote its more edutaining rides. The best by far was the centrifuge, that zoetrope-shaped spinning room whose floor would fall out once centrifugal force had successfully usurped gravity as the main force holding you to a surface.

There was an IMAX theater, and we were there every night, seeing The Dream Is Alive, the greatest Shuttle film ever (I think Christa McAuliffe and the other doomed astronauts are shown training in that movie), and a bunch of others, including some science stuff in 3D. It was a little bit like spending a week living at a museum—we even ate in the same cafeteria that visitors did. We lived on freeze-dried icecream that we bought from the concession stand, and one night we were fed an entire meal of freeze-dried or reconstituted foods. I remember the peas, preferable dry, but not much else.

Our counselor was a big handsome fighter pilot named Ty or something, who told us more than once that he was a) a graduate of Top Gun and b) that he'd hung out with Lea Thompson when they shot the movie. Because of this double cred, we obeyed everything he said, and adhered to the lights out.

The focal point of the week at Space Camp was the shuttle mission, but even there, like in the pool, the younger kids got screwed. Our "shuttle" was this half-assed wooden play set, more or less the size of a shuttle, with a ladder that carried you from the flight deck to the crew deck, and an "airlock" that led to the cargo bay. Up top there were screens switches, but mostly they were simple PC screens to show wireframe flight-simulator type visuals, and switches leading to little lightbulbs and not much else. Down below, we had computer screens, and we had jacks for the headset intercom, and not much else. It was good enough for make-believe, but the Space Academy kids had a real frickin' shuttle.

We weren't even allowed in it. It was a shuttle mockup that was, I think, used by the astronauts themselves, complete with all the same hardware. Everything about it was 100X more real than our plywood construct, and every glance we stole at it was one of jealousy. It was featured in every brochure on the camp, apparently without fine print that you had to be this old—or maybe this tall—to see its insides. Crashing that thing would be like crashing the shuttle for real, dangerous and scary and expensive. Good thing I only crashed the POS junior edition.

Yep. When we were assigned roles, I didn't get any of the good gigs: One of the girls, Cathy I think her name was, got a freakin' space walk. Either Sean or Comer got to be the pilot (naturally), Clint I think was somewhere on the flight deck too. Me? I was shoved down in the crew deck with a couple of paste-eaters, "mission specialists" with nothing to do but report on fake experiments—probably involving mice or plants germinating or something. Maybe it was out of resentment, then, that I caused the whole mission to fail, epically.

Remember I said we learned trivia on Apple IIe's? Well, I guess I didn't learn enough, which is ironic, cuz I'm usually an ace at Trivial Pursuit. The thing about our make-believe mission was that it wasn't sophisticated enough to be a true flight sim—instead, our counselors told us what was going on, and hit us with multiple-choice decisions on the computer screens—kind of a realtime choose-your-own-adventure—that would guide our craft safely home or into flaming oblivion.

We'd made it through the whole mission and were about to re-enter when our window of opportunity somehow closed, and we needed to pick a new landing site. The multiple choice options included White Plains and White Sands. White Plains. White Sands. They sound similar, right? I mean, I grew up in Indiana, so they were equally distant from my geographic frame of reference, and I was the product of the American education system, so I probably didn't even have a geographic frame of reference. I suggested that we go to White Plains. Stressed it, over the weak protests of my teammates. I was damn sure. I reasoned with them over the intercom: It was a plain, and if we were in trouble, hell, we'd at least be able to put this sucker down on flat land.

I was wrong. White Plains, being a densely populated NYC suburb, is not a good place to land the Space Shuttle. Not only that, it's in the wrong direction, if you miss your window over Florida. White Sands, New Mexico, all you Yeager fans surely know, is a fine place to crash land just about anything.

It was a fun week, Space Camp, but needless to say, I never went back. And I never became an astronaut. [Space Camp]

Today, I was going to write about how to do something else in space. But, I changed my mind. Let's back up to the beginning of a mission. What's it like to go through a launch? How does it feel? Are you able to sleep the night before? Do you get scared? What do you eat before?

Steak and eggs. Medium rare and over easy. This is what the first astronauts ate before launch and why not? I remember during one of my launch counts, the ladies were taking our pre-launch breakfast orders, going around the table. I was hearing things like, dry toast. A little yogurt. Cereal. You gotta be kidding me, what kind of pantywaists am I flying with? They got to me and I replied firmly and evenly, "Steak and eggs, medium rare and over easy." Everyone looked at me funny. I stated the obvious. "Hey, we might go out tomorrow and get blown up. I'm going to have steak and eggs!" Immediately, three guys changed their orders to steak and eggs. I was doing all of us a favor, really. You need a hearty breakfast before launch, you're going to be really busy. Yogurt? Come on.

Sleep wasn't really a problem either, although I tended to wake up a few times at night in anticipation, just like when I have other important morning appointments. We usually wake up about four hours before launch, and hit the ground running.

After breakfast and cleanup, it's time to get suited up. Walk down the hall and meet up with the suit technicians. Seasoned professionals, your suit tech has been with you all through training. He or she makes sure that everything is just right, and after the pressure checks are complete, sends you on your way.

From that point, it's a bit of a blur, as you walk out of the Operations and Checkout Building at the Kennedy Space Center, to the applause of the employees who have gathered at the entrance. You climb onto the Astrovan, which is a converted Airstream RV from the Apollo days. Crews typically joke and banter a bit, the atmosphere is lighthearted, during the short drive to the launch pad. Everyone falls silent as the bird comes into view. She is beautiful. She is ready, as are we.

At the pad, we climb out and ride the elevator to the 195-foot level, where we are greeted by the ingress crew. Time for one more quick pee. Maybe for good luck, but more, so that I won't have to use the adult diaper that I'm wearing! After all, we strap into the Space Shuttle about two and a half hours before launch.

Is this when the jitters hit? Actually, no. This is kind of a time to relax a bit. The environment is totally familiar, thanks to the hours upon hours spent in the simulators. For once, nobody is talking to you. Nobody is asking you for something. It's not unusual to doze off.

As the launch count proceeds, there is a point at which things get serious. Certainly as we come out of the T-20 minute hold. After we come out of the T-9 minute hold, the cockpit is sterile. No unnecessary chatter on the intercom. Is this when it becomes real? Not just yet. For me, it is not until the T-90 second point, when the Launch Director says something like, "Columbia, close and lock your visors, initiate O2 flow, have a good flight." Then it very suddenly becomes very real.

What did I feel at T-Zero? The answer might surprise you. I felt relief.

Certainly, I was keyed up. After all, we were sitting on top of a bomb, being accelerated to orbital velocity of 17,500 mph in less than nine minutes. Pretty heady stuff! But the thing of which astronauts are most afraid is not getting the chance to launch into space. What if I get hit by a car? What if the doctors find something wrong with me at the last minute? What happens if…? All of those worries go away the instant the boosters light!

First stage on the Space Shuttle is shaky. You can't really read the instruments and screens very well. At T-Zero it feels like someone kicks the back of your seat really hard, the Shuttle seems to leap off of the pad. You hear the wind noise build into a high-pitched whine. You see the blue sky start to get dark, fairly quickly. You don't so much hear the rumble of the engines as feel them. Everything is oddly orderly, even quiet. That's because we are accustomed to the simulators, when all the warning and emergency lights and klaxons are going off, as we deal with the failure scenario presented to us by the training team. On launch day, pretty much everything usually works!

On my first flight, I was up on the flight deck for launch. I had a small mirror, through which I could look out of the overhead windows, which were pointed more or less towards the Earth. (The Shuttle rolls into launch azimuth and heels over as the ascent proceeds.) I saw the ground rushing away, through the flames of the engines.

After about two minutes, the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) tail off as the last bits of fuel in them are consumed. You feel the deceleration, and then see the flash of bright light as the separation motors fire, peeling them away from the stack. It is suddenly very smooth and quiet. My heart leapt into my throat when this happened to me the first time. My first thought was that the main engines had also stopped and we were about to go down! But, that was not the case, I just hadn't expected second stage to be so smooth.

During the last few minutes of launch, the vehicle accelerates to orbital velocity. You are under three Gs of loading, so it feels like a small gorilla is sitting on your chest. It takes a little effort to breath, but it's OK.

Suddenly, right on cue (you're always watching the clock), the main engines cut off, and you are instantly weightless! As I looked out the windows and for the first time beheld the awesome beauty of the Earth from space, I was almost overcome with emotion. I had made it, I had realized my childhood dream. I allowed myself to revel in this moment for just a few seconds. Yes, I was in space, but it was also time to get to work!

Maybe next, I'll tell you about the Soyuz.

Follow Leroy Chiao in his guest column, as we celebrate human life in space with our "Get Me Off This Rock" week.

It's such a short time before the skies over Florida will no longer thunder to the sound of the Space Shuttle's main engines under full thrust. But that doesn't mean that after September 16, 2010, there will be any letup in the requirements to put people and hardware into orbit. What ships are in line to hop into the venerable old Shuttle's shoes? Five, at last count, all with their own talents and differences.

Check out each photo in the gallery, a dossier of facts about the next vehicles that will take us and our crap into orbit, and possibly to the moon and Mars:

And there you have it. Though none of these Space Shuttle replacements appears quite as glamorous or high-tech, each is special in its own way—and with any luck they could all be cheaper and more reliable in getting people and hardware into space. Orion, of course, has a historic future ahead of it, as it follows in the Apollo program's footsteps and takes man back to the Moon.

Additional Resources and Photo Sources:
Orion: NASA and Wikipedia
Dragon: SpaceX and Wikipedia
Cygnus: Orbital and Wikipedia
PPTS: Russian Space Web and Wikipedia
Kliper: Russian Space Web and Wikipedia

Quiz 1: Test Your Knowledge Of The Space Shuttle.

Quiz 2: Test Your Knowledge of the Space Program Over the Last 50 years.

Like most kids in 1969, Leroy sat enthralled in his Danville, California living room in front of a black-and-white television, watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. He was eight years old, the perfect age to decide that he would one day be an astronaut.

So how did it actually happen? Well, Chiao's high-level degrees in chemical engineering, experience developing advanced aerospace materials, job at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in California, and over 2500 hours as an instrument-rated pilot certainly made for a convincing astronaut CV. But in the end, it all comes down to a standard application for federal employment, which Chiao got a hold of in 1989. It's the same one used by every federal employee, from the IRS on up.

On the blank line for "Job Applying For," he wrote "Astronaut."

And 7 months later in the summer of 1990, he was accepted with 22 others into the 13th class of US astronauts. After training, two years later he was assigned to STS-65 on the shuttle Columbia, which took off in July of 1994. Since then, Chiao flew on two more shuttle missions (STS-72 and STS-92) and commanded Expedition 10 on the International Space Station, spending more than half a year in orbit.

So what does being one of just a few dozen people who have spent such a long time in space feel like? What does it to do your life? That's what we aim to find out.

"There are only around 400 people worldwide [who have been in space], and even fewer for long durations," Chiao told me. "Six and a half months is a lot of time to reflect, think about life and what's important. The best thing you can do is just look at the Earth—it's beautiful, and every part is different, beautiful in its own way, and yet the same. It's pretty profound, as you would imagine. It gives you a much bigger view on life—small things that used to bother me seem so insignificant."

But in addition to attempting to articulate the massive hugeness of all that, Leroy's going to be blogging mostly about the small stuff—the daily tasks like brushing your teeth, taking a leak, and yes, reporting to work in the cold vacuum of space.

"You can't simulate life in microgravity," he says, "so when you get up there, the first interesting thing is seeing what life is like, familiarizing yourself with things like cutting your fingernails, brushing your teeth. How do you do that?"

Those are the questions Chiao's going to be answering this week, helping us lowly earth-anchored souls attempt to wrap our gravity-addled brains around what life must be like in space. I can't wait.

Stay tuned for Gizmodo's Astroblogger column with Leroy Chiao

First, a primer. Fire in microgravity isn't the flickering kind that happened when you set the house ablaze with your chemistry set as a kid. It's actually spherical (see image), and spreads around space stations, space shuttles or special projects like Orion faster than you can say "Hey, I didn't know NASA let us smoke on the space shuttle?"

NASA astronaut Jerry Linenger got to experience space fire first hand in 1997, when an oxygen candle aboard Mir caught fire and filled the space station with smoke. "I did not expect smoke to spread so quickly," Linenger said in an interview with Discovery. "(It) was about 10 times faster than I would expect a fire to spread on a space station."

So NASA, not wanting to roast its astronauts alive, has continued to research and fine tune a variety of next generation space fire-fighting systems. A few prototypes work well, but they're messy, coating the fire spheres and pretty much everything else in the vicinity with a fine mist, fog or "water foam" made up of a non-toxic oxygen-nitrogen mix.

The special extinguishers have actually been around for about a decade, but only recently has NASA noticed them, funded them, and started testing in microgravity experiments. Previously, NASA's main advice for astronauts in a dangerous fire-related situation was "abandon ship" (seriously)— an option which would be, obviously unavailable to an Orion crew on a Mars or Moon mission.

I say bring on the mess so long as the "Go Directly to Earth" autopilot button stays dry. If I were in a tin can millions of miles from home, I'd take soggy, foamy clothes over the other option any day of the week. Better messy than dead, says I. [MSNBC]

In the video it looks like it's far away, but take into account that those are very wide lenses. Of course, they are out of the airspace exclusion area, but they are quite close. Apparently, from up there the clarity of the launch is amazing.

I so want to do this.