Wild Blue Nonsense

Youth wants to know.

Ha, ha, Uncle Ken make joke!

The only way for astronauts to travel to and from the ISS is via the Soyuz spacecraft, which is run by the Russians.  Supplies are delivered by unmanned vehicles and different parties are involved.  So far, the list includes Russia, NASA, the European Space Agency, and Japan.  It is an International Space Station, after all, and they all send stuff up.  NASA contracts the launches to two companies and it probably saves them a few bucks and lets them off the hook if something goes wrong with the launch.

I wonder why the Chinese aren't in on the game; they have their own space stations but they are a lot smaller.  Their first space station, probably only a lab, is due to come crashing to Earth in the next month or three but the second one is still fine.  They also have a much bigger station on the drawing board which is due to reach orbit in the next couple of years.  That's what I've read but it may be fake news.

There's not much point in going to the moon unless it can generate a lot of income; it's too damn expensive.  Maybe some day robots can build habitats out of moon bricks but food and water will always be a problem for any human habitation.  For the time being, things like the ISS are all we can expect.   We are still in the early stages of this game and there is much yet to learn.  Mars is still a long way off.

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I've liked the few Werner Herzog movies that I've seen but The Wild Blue Yonder was a real stinker.  There may have been a good story hidden there, but I thought it was a steaming pile of self indulgent twaddle, and about an hour too long.  The "musical" soundtrack drove me nuts.

Having said that, there were bits I liked, a lot.  The dialogue by the alien, for instance.  The statements about the sins were pretty good and the arc of the story itself was nice and it would have made an excellent thirty minute radio-type broadcast.  But as a movie I thought it sucked.  Herzog managed to make dramatic film images into something very boring and tedious.  Good idea but terrible execution.

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For further insight on life on the ISS check out YouTube, there's a lot of stuff including Q&A sessions.  It looks like they have some fun in between the experiments and research, and the place is big enough that they can sneak off for some "personal" time and maybe turn off the cameras.  One can only hope.

I doubt that returning astronauts would like a  dramatic splashdown.  The Soyuz capsule lands on the flat steppe of Kazakhstan.