When David Bowie released his song “Space Oddity” five days before the launch of the Apollo 11 mission, singing “For here am I sitting in a tin can, far above the world. Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do”, he accurately described how it must have felt like for the astronauts to go to space.

We are used to seeing spaceships in fiction that resemble luxury airliners, well protected from the harsh vacuum of space. And even if something went wrong, there would always be a habitable planet nearby for an emergency landing. Rarely are the actual physics and dangers of space travel depicted with any accuracy.

Star Trek’s spaceships behave more like battlecruisers on an ocean, Star Wars’ fighter battles resemble World War 2 aerial dogfights¹, and even 2001: A Space Odyssey’s Discovery offers creature comforts resembling a cruise ship. It’s how we’re used to see spaceships.

Last week, I saw First Man. And while it is mostly about the first human on the moon than the technology that got him there, it is also one of the few movies that gets close to what it must have felt like to be strapped into what amounts to a tin can, on top of what amounts to a giant and (hopefully) controlled explosion, only to be shot into the most inhospitable environment known to us.

Both the Gemini and Apollo capsules were about as minimal as you could get without exposing the humans inside them to the vacuum outside. They featured little space, control surfaces almost everywhere, and tiny windows for astronauts to look outside of.

Even if later spacecrafts, such as the space shuttle, did offer more space and amenities than the Gemini or Apollo crafts, it still wasn’t a relaxing cruise up into orbit. But the Space Shuttle was discontinued due to costs, so right now, only the Soyuz capsules are capable of carrying humans into space. And while they’ve been upgraded over time, they are still more or less the same cramped tin cans from the space race — enough to get humans to the ISS, but nothing you’d want to spend a whole mission in.

Astronauts might be in for some updates though: both SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Boeing’s Star Liner are set to offer a bit more creature comfort thanks to modern technology and redesigned space suits for the astronauts, with larger interiors and bigger windows. Both are scheduled for human test flights in 2019.

A Sense of Scale

It can be hard to appreciate just how large our neighbouring planets can be, relative to us. So a company made a video that shows how our sky would look like if the planets were as close as the Moon.

Echo Echo Echo Echo

Fuel oil storage tanks built during World War 2 in Scotland are today the largest reverberation chambers in the world. And to get to them, you need to pass through a very narrow tube: Testing The World’s Longest Echo (YouTube).

📖 Weekly Longread 📚

Just before the fall of the Berlin wall, a vibrant scene emerged around Commodore 64 video games in East Germany. But the teenagers trading games back and forth were not alone. Video Games In East Germany: The Stasi Played Along

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