On Monday, a small crew of six astronauts descended to the undersea laboratory Aquarius off the coast of Florida. In the laboratory, the trainees will practice activities associated with outer space travel, such as spacewalks, crane operation, and handling safety concerns. The program is titled NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations, or NEEMO. Ironically, this trip made by the “aquanaut” trainees comes at a very difficult time for NASA as the Obama administration prepares to cut support and finance for the space program. I enjoyed Kenneth Chang’s “NASA Under the Sea” article because it was very well written and easy to understand. I also liked the topic; I find spaceflight and the different aspects of the NASA program very interesting. I also liked the way Chang covered the story, he was very detailed and informative describing the “aquanaut’s” activities.
I do not have many suggestions to make the article even stronger. If I were to add one thing, it would be the viewpoint of critics of NASA and its programs. This would provide a further understanding on the current issue, which is whether or not to continue funding space exploration. Another suggestion I have is to explain more of the simulations that trainees will experience while in the NEEMO base. This would just be to provide more information about the nature of the program.
Overall, I enjoyed Kenneth Chang of the New York Times’ article. It was very interesting and well written. I learned a new fact through reading it. I was unaware of the existence of the underwater training base, Aquarius. It was quite fascinating to learn about its use and the features of NASA training. Overall, I think the article was excellent.
Aine Cain
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/science/space/11neemo.html?ref=science
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Aine’s review of Kenneth Chang’s article, “Absent a Moon or Mars, Recreating Space 65 Feet Under the Sea,” was very intriguing. I liked how she described what NEEMO was and the purpose of it. I also enjoyed that she included what examples of training are. I was fond that she explained that NASA would soon be cut off by the Obama administration, as well, threatening the future of both NASA and NEEMO.
ReplyDeleteWhat I thought Aine could do better was explain why Obama is cutting the program as well. I would also go into more depth about what would happen to the future of NASA, including NEEMO, after Obama did cut the programs.
Overall, Aine’s review was very well written and unique. It was also filled with information that I had no idea about. An example of something I did not know about before was that there was an underwater station, known as NEEMO, which helped train astronauts before they were sent to space.
Review of the article, "Absent a Moon or Mars, Recreating Space 65 feet Under the Sea." This article and review was very interesting because i never knew that NASA had a whole space station under the sea. Aine's portrayal of the article was very well written. The facts were straight forward and you learned a lot throughout the whole article. One of my favorite parts of the article was when Aine explained that the Obama administration might have to cut spending of NASA. In doing so they are threatening the whole Space Program in the USA.
ReplyDeleteAll and all Aine's review was very well written and described the current pickle that NASA is in with spending. In this article I learned that NASA has a mock space station under the sea that is off the coast of Florida. I knew that they trained in pools and stuff like that, but never knew that they had one under the ocean.
I thought that the topic of this article was quite interesting. Our further research into astronomy continues to discover mind bogging anomalies in the deep reaches of space. Also, I liked how she included a bit of the political background on this article with the Obama administration cutting funding for NASA. Finally, I found the writing style and word usage to be quite interesting.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I thought the review was rather short and I would have liked to know more about the article. Also, in the summary section, she talked a fair bit about her opinion on the article, which should have gone in the section for her opinion, making the already quite short summary even shorter.
I did not know that NASA was able to use water to simulate conditions in space underwater. I would think that the reduced pressure in space would be poorly simulated by the greatly increased pressure of water, however water would simulate the reduced gravity felt in space and would help to give astronauts training for working with large heavy suits on.
I think that Aine’s review for her article was very good and interesting. It was about how astronauts are training undersea at a special NASA station so that travel in space will be easier to them. Three things I learned are that one, this program, called NEEMO (NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations) even existed. It is a very ambitious and rigorous training and sounds like an interesting thing to be involved in. Another thing I learned that they are training in specific fields for outer space travel, such as spacewalks, crane operation, and safety issues. Lastly, I learned that this program has come about at a hard economic time for both NASA and the president, and it is going to be hard to keep it afloat in the future.
ReplyDeleteI think that two things that could have been improved in the write up of Aine’s review is that there could have been more detail used from the article. Maybe some more information about the economic situation would have been useful. Another thing that would have made this review better is more description about what the astronauts felt about the training (if that information was available).
In total, I learned a lot from this article and I will definitely read up more on this type of training. This topic was a very unique one, and gave me insight to how astronauts are trained.