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This week could be one for the Space history books…

Atlantis (STS-122) is scheduled to land on Wednesday. There are four possible landing opportunities, two at Kennedy (preferred) and two at Edwards AFB. As you may know NASA likes to avoid landing the Shuttle at Edwards because then they have to load up the orbiter onto the specially-equipped Boeing 747 and haul it back to Kennedy, which looks cool, but delays the next scheduled mission for that Shuttle. Now, typically if the weather at both these locations is unfavorable due to storms or high-winds then NASA will delay the landing and try again the next day. They have enough oxygen and fuel to make it to early Friday if necessary. But, here’s the catch…

Last week President Bush authorized the DoD to attempt to destroy a doomed super-secret spy satellite, designated USA 193, that is expected to tumble uncontrolled from orbit within the next few weeks. The U.S. Navy will try to destroy the satellite prior to its reentry by slamming a ship-fired SM-3 into it.

from Sky and Telescope:
“Apparently, DoD computer models have shown that, if left alone, more than half of USA 193’s roughly 5,000-pound mass would survive the atmospheric plunge and reach the ground. In particular, there’s a 20-inch diameter tank containing about a half ton of the highly toxic propellant hydrazine. So the decision was made to break up the satellite if possible.”

The DoD has determined that Thursday is the first possible day to start letting the Navy begin ‘target-practice’ and let SM-3 ‘meet’ USA 193. And this brings up the interesting question of, do you really want to be launching a kinetic warhead into space to break-up a spy satellite into thousands of little bits the same day 7 relatively un-armed Astronauts are attempting to guide a rather fragile glider back to Earth. Now, admittedly the Earth’s atmosphere and Space are pretty big, but if something were to happen it would look rather… what’s the word… stupid.

NASA is remaining surprisingly mum about the conflict, but I bet NASA really, really, really wants to get out-of-the-way and land Atlantis on Wednesday. And that brings up the interesting possibility of the fifth landing opportunity on Wednesday. That’s right, the fifth. If the weather at both Kennedy and Edwards is unfavorable, then Atlantis can also land at White Sands, NM. The last and only time the Shuttle has landed at White Sands was in 1982 when Columbia (STS-3) landed there during an R&D flight. But as it stands White Sands is now prepping for a possible landing.

Admittedly, this landing of Atlantis is not going to be as exciting as Jerry Bruckheimer could make it, and it will not end in Bruce Willis sacrificing himself to blow up an asteroid, but bringing in a Space Shuttle for a combat landing just before you start shooting at an out-of-control toxic spy satellite is about as exciting as it gets.

Working at a technology company that doesn’t make products like Apple or web services like Monster, but instead helps those companies have faster-performing web sites is sometimes a little hard to explain. Plus most people don’t really care how the Internet really works. But, every so often something happens on the Internet that catches the media’s attention, and when we’re quick Akamai’s marketing team puts some pretty cool info online for everyone to see. Here is a time-lapse depiction of the Middle-east Internet outage that started a couple weeks ago. The thing to realize about this animation is that all the lines are Internet BGP routes that are being advertised as good to use for Internet traffic. However, the latency on those links is so bad as to make using Web applications through those links practically impossible. Yes you heard me right, the Internet does not magically fix itself in real-time.

As anyone who’s talked with me about design will know, I’m a huge fan of Edward Tufte. This diagram produced during an investigative story about suicides is both graphically interesting and somewhat beautiful despite the morbid reality behind the data.

Today was the Virginia Presidential Primary of 2008. It was a rather historic day, and the first time I’ve really cared much about voting in a primary. Of the two remaining democratic candidates, not one was a white man, opening up the interesting possibility of a woman or African American man becoming President of the United States. The weather today was absolutely frightful with black ice forming everywhere. That kept the Maryland polls open a few hours longer, but by the end of the night Barack Obama had managed to over-take Hillary Clinton in the delegate count by winning decisively in Virginia, DC and Maryland. At this point it’s looking like neither one will win enough delegates to be the definitive candidate for the democratic party.