Bigelow Aerospace, A new Genesis in space Options

[ljk4-1]

To quote:

On June 16, he'll use a Russian Dnepr rocket to launch a 1/3-scale Genesis model of his planned commercial orbital space station. That much has been public for a while. What I didn't learn until just now is what will be on that module.

Freefloating inside will be 1,000 photocards and small personal objects contributed by Bigelow employees. If all goes well, those items will be continuously blown throughout the pressurized module in a kind of space collage. Six onboard cameras will stream video to Bigelow's new website, which will launch tomorrow or Friday. Seven external cameras will provide views of the Earth from space and the outside of the module.

If that doesn't get even the most disinterested member of the public at least intrigued about the possibilities of space travel, I don't know what will.

But it gets better. Subject to a successful launch of the first module, Bigelow will launch a second Genesis module in September, and that one will contain photos and other small items contributed by anyone who cares to pony up $295.

Full article here:

http://michaelbelfiore.com/blog/2006/05/bi...s-to-orbit.html

[Rakhir]

Genesis II launched at 15:02 UTC

The status of the spacecraft's health is reported to be good.

[jabe]

There have been lots of updates at bigelow site.

They have a neat vid of the fly your stuff posted there.

curious to see how the bingo will work...
cheers
jb

[jabe]

Bigelow has update of a picture..
pretty neat one how did they do it??

[stevesliva]

Looks like a fisheye lens was used.

[jabe]

looks like they are ready to play space bingo

[jabe]

update at Bigelow site

Engineers at Bigelow Aerospace have tweaked the exterior cameras of Genesis II to provide a higher-definition picture. The results, seen here, show a colorful and vivid view of our Earth home. The crisp images give a sense that you're flying at more than four miles per second right along with Genesis II.

Question..how do you "tweak" the camera to Hi-def...???
cheers
jb

[tfisher]

From one of the image captions: "The image shows recent improvements by Bigelow Aerospace controllers on the resolution of images beamed down from the unmanned pathfinder module." Sounds to me like they used to be decimating or severely compressing the images and they changed their software to send full (or at least higher) resolution. I wonder if they have an extremely limited downlink bandwidth? Reminds me of Galileo with its stuck high gain antenna...