Astronaut Completes First Foursquare Check-In From Space

On Friday, NASA astronaut Douglas H. Wheelock (@Astro_Wheels) became the first person to complete a Foursquare check-in from space.

According to the official Foursquare Blog, Commander Wheelock unlocked the NASA Explorer Badge while aboard the International Space Station. The badge will be available to future space travelers using the location-based networking service.

As a result of a partnership between NASA and Foursquare, earth-dwellers can also unlock the NASA Explorer Badge by checking in at various locations on the ground, such as the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum.

In addition to earning extraterrestrial accolades via Foursquare, Wheelock is also known for tweeting incredible photographs of earth from space.

View the NASA Explorer Badge (below), then check out our slideshow of the most stunning photos astronauts have tweeted from space.

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Comments

[0311SaltDog]

02:52 PM on 10/24/2010

Rad

[Dontay Colvin]

06:46 PM on 10/23/2010

Waiting to see if Adobe and Apple capitalize off of this....don't be surprised if commercial pops up!!

[jsarets]

07:23 PM on 10/22/2010

It's a bit puzzling that they overlaid a depiction of a Shuttle orbiter on the NASA "meatball" for their new "badge", being that Shuttle only has 2 or 3 flights left before the fleet is retired.

After that the orbiters will be museum pieces -- the most sophisticated flying machines ever built by quite some margin -- complete with mockup replicas of the main engines, since the real main engines are earmarked for the new NASA launch vehicle SLS (aka "the rocket without a mission or a payload").

SLS will be able to lift 70 tons to LEO. The trouble is that the largest commercial, military, or scientific payloads ever launched are under 28 tons to LEO, and most of those payloads were headed to GEO (where SLS can't go because it doesn't have an upper stage or explicit funding for an upper stage) or SSO (where SLS can't go because it can only launch from KSC into low-inclination orbits).

The only conceivable reason for a rocket so powerful is to launch manned spacecraft to destinations beyond earth orbit (BEO). It's far too large for any other purpose. But we don't have any manned BEO missions planned or a lander or a habitation module or an upper stage to propel the stack out of earth orbit.

All we'll have is a great big booster rocket and a standing army on the ground to support it for 10+ years without anything to launch for any purpose.

[obviousman88]

01:40 PM on 10/23/2010

I suppose they might be used for launching multiple payloads into LEO. Should cut the cost pretty significantly.

Any ideas about BEO missions?

[jsarets]

08:54 PM on 10/23/2010

Multiple payloads to LEO is usually problematic, because payloads generally don't want to be inserted into very similar orbits.

It's not like GEO where the individual payloads can reach somewhat different target orbits from the same GTO insertion. Ariane 5 (and 4) have had success with dual-payload launches, but only for GTO insertions, and in practice commercial payloads were very often launched with government payloads to fill out the manifest. The planned Ariane 6 is rumored to be a slightly less powerful launcher targeted at single large GEO payloads alongside Soyuz-2/Fregat for smaller GEO birds.

Multiple-payload to LEO manifests are only really appropriate for launching comsat constellations in multiple clusters. For example, just last week GlobalStar launched six identical comsats to LEO on a Soyuz-2/Fregat, with four more such launches planned for 2011. The 72-satellite Iridium NEXT constellation will be launched in clusters on SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicles in 2015.

But both Fregat and the F9 upper stage have multiple-restart engine capability, which is almost essential for deploying multiple payloads into their proper insertion orbits.

On the other hand, the SLS core stage is powered by Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSME), which only have ground-start capability and cannot be restarted in flight. They start before liftoff and cut off at orbit insertion. That's it.

I have many ideas about BEO missions, but we can't afford them alongside SLS at current funding levels.