Moonshots Beyond the Cloud

The HDEV experiment on the International Space Station stopped working sometime in July 2019. The official NASA app for Android removed HDEV support in version 1.90, released on August 30, 2019, as its change log entry notes: Removed the ISS HDEV section which has reached end of life HDEV (High Definition Earth-Viewing ) was a set of commercial HD video cameras mounted on the exterior or the ISS and aimed at the Earth . The purpose of this NASA experiment was to evaluate the effects of long-term exposure to space radiation of off the shelf video equipment. The cameras streamed beautiful live images of the Earth from space and worked continuously, except for the night side of the orbit or when operational constraints prevented it. The end of life notice in the video feed of NASA's HDEV experiment. Credit: NASA. The loss of the payload is not unexpected as the harsh environment was eventually going to damage the devices. Still, the general public loved these views and...

Some bloggers write a book by putting together their posts, revising the content, and expanding it with new material. I always used Google+ as a blog and I did something similar by using my posts as an early draft of the book Space Apps for Android I self-published. In a video conversation with Nina Trankova , Monika Schmidt, and Bob Danley, a part of Nina’s "On e Board" series, I explained how I repurposed the posts of one of my Google+ collections as the backbone of the book. I also discussed the Lean Publishing workflow with which I produce the book.