According to Yahoo! News, the astronauts at the International Space Station will be conducting a spacewalk next week. During this spacewalk, among other things, they will conduct a Russian commercial demonstration by hitting a golf ball teed up on the exterior of Pirs. We were talking about this on the van home. A number of questions arose.
- How do they keep the ball on the tee?
- When the astronaut swings, will he start to rotate in space?
- What happens to a golf ball in space? Does the core (liquid or cork) make a difference? The color? The dimples?
- Will the golf ball reenter the atmosphere, or just become orbiting space junk?
The lesson we learned from this? Never have a discussion of this nature on a van of people that work in the space industry.
One additional note from the article:
Working hundreds of miles away from home didn’t stop [Astronaut] Lopez-Alegria from participating in this week’s general election. Texas law permits residents who happen to be in orbit on Election Day to cast a ballot from space. This was first done by David Wolf from the Mir space station in 1997. Lopez-Alegria made his choices on an encrypted computer ballot that was downlinked to Mission Control and forwarded to the county clerk’s office in Houston for tabulation.
I wonder if he had a paper trail?
