The Discovery mission is making history on many different fronts. In addition
to be the space flight on the success of which the future of NASA’s shuttle
program now rests, and aside from the title=”Space.com article about Stepen Robinson’s historic spacewalk”
href=”http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/080503_eva3_gapfiller.html”
target=_blank>historic underbelly spacewalk that happened late last week,
Discovery is the origin of the first podcast from Space.

“Hello, this is Mission Specialist Number 2 Steve Robinson from the
Space Shuttle Discovery. We’re high in orbit on our last day of orbit. Tomorrow
we come home. I’m currently talking to you just off the southeast tip of
Indonesia in the daylight and moving on towards night. It’s been a fantastic
mission up here, absolutely amazing. Some of the hardest work that any of us
have ever done. We haven’t had a whole lot of sleep, and we’ve been extremely
busy and really happy.”

That statement from Mission Specialist Robinson comprises about half of the
mp3 file NASA’s currently hosting for title=”Download link on NASA’s website for MSP Robinson’s podcast”
href=”http://www1.nasa.gov/returntoflight/crew/robinson_podcast.html”
target=_blank>download from its site.  It’s been a busy, notable week
for Robinson, was also the astronaut who performed Discovery’s historic third
spacewalk.

Okay, I’ll come clean. This transmission isn’t necessarily a true “podcast”
because its information isn’t enclosed in an rss file. So it can only be
syndicated through old-fashioned “clickin’ on a link on the website”.

Hopefully it won’t take NASA long to come around to producing true podcasts.
They’d be the perfect way to foster positive publicity in a time when the role
of long-term space exploration in this country’s is being called into
question.

Parts of the post are via the title=”Geekzone article about the NASA podcast”
href=”http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=4988″
target=_blank>Geekzone