************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** The recent John Glenn shuttle mission (STS-85) has joined a handful of recent Real Life events that have brought parts of Virtual Reality to a screeching halt. NASA sites and other mirror sites covering the Glenn's launch were handling web requests at a rate not seen since the release of the Ken Starr report and the Mars Pathfinder landing. Space and sex. Why am I surprised? While its arguable that sex permeates media and is available at the click of a button or the flip of a page, space news tends to be ignored by mainstream media sources. As the Mars Pathfinder and Glenn web events demonstrate, a large and informed segment of the population is hungry for information space exploration. NASA's front end to its root site at www.nasa.gov is laid out in a webzine format, featuring NASA's leading story of the day and links to some of its current missions, like the space shuttle and the Deep Space 1 probe. Next time they expand domain system, the powes that be should probably create a .nasa top level domain. We tend to think of the Kennedy Space center as the whole of NASA. NASA is actually comprised of dozens of facilities across the USA, from the Goddard Institute in New York to the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico (when you want congress to authorize billions of dollars, spreading around the lucre is one way of getting senators in key states onside). Each of these facilities has its own web server serving up all sorts of interesting bits of news, research, technical data, and history. A list of NASA's various facilities can be found at www.nasa.gov/nasaorgs/index.html. Most of the really sexy exploration stuff NASA does is hosted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). JPL is responsible for missions like the Mars Pathfinder and the Jupiter-orbiting Galileo spacecraft. The JPL web site at www.jpl.nasa.gov provides megabytes of some of the most exciting images to be found on the net. The Galileo mission, which seemed to have been nearly ignored by the mainstream press, features two years worth of images of Jupiter and its more interesting moons like the volcanic Io and Europa's icy oceans, which may harbor life. If you're really keen on browsing through images of space or you're looking for some cool Windows wallpaper, NASA has lumped them all together at the NASA Information Exchange site (nix.nasa.gov). You'll find images ranging from Apollo to its new generation of X Planes. X Planes? The X Planes are NASA's future shuttle replacements scheduled for service in 1999. Yeah, that soon. They will service the International Space Station and, if you take NASA's word for it, provide lower cost payload delivery for commercial space ventures. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center provides details at its web page at www1.msfc.nasa.gov. The space station itself is featured at station.nasa.gov. NASA's rather banal sounding Office of Space Flight at www.hq.nasa.gov/osf provides additional details about the space station. Available for download is a Microsoft PowerPoint slide show giving you an overview of the station's laborious piece- by-piece assembly in space. If you're really into some of the hard-core engineering behind rocketry or you just like looking at photos of massive columns of fire, the White Sands Test Facility at www.wstf.nasa.gov is sure to please. The home page of the Langley Research Center (www.larc.nasa.gov) also provides text and images detailing some of the advanced research going on in the world of space and aeronautical engineering. NASA, while in the best position to bring you news on the space program, doesn't have a lock on it. The CNN site (cnn.com) has a section devoted to space news. Another good source is Jonathan's Space Report email list. You can subscribe to the list or preview it by pointing your browser to hea- www.harvard.edu/QEDT/jcm/space/jsr/jsr.html. If you're interested in actually visiting Florida's "space coast" and want the latest, the Florida Today website has information about upcoming launches, good vantage points, and points of interest at www.flatoday.com/space.