Getting Out of the Suburbs

Assorted space news from the weekend:

• Bad, bad news in Hubble-land. The telescope had a pretty major failure over the weekend that puts the upcoming launch (currently planned for October 14) in serious jeopardy. Figures — the darn thing would start failing a mere two weeks before we’re going to service it. STS-125 could be delayed until after the new year.
• SpaceX, one of the private companies working on developing the capability to get to orbit, successfully made it to orbit on Sunday after three failures in the past two years. Pretty cool. Congratulations to them.
• Three Chinese astronauts returned to Earth on Sunday after a successful mission in which they completed China’s first spacewalk. This is only their third manned mission ever. One of the spacesuits was Russian, while the other was a new suit designed by the Chinese. Congrats to them.

As for my weekend, it was full and fun. Months ago, Jose and I bought tickets to Austin City Limits this past weekend. But the lineup of bands wasn’t particularly inspiring, and after two hectic weeks of hurricane crap we decided to sell the tickets and have a relaxing weekend in Houston. Turns out that we found plenty of fun stuff to do here!
We promised ourselves that we’d do something fun — and outside of Clear Lake — to substitute for not going to ACL, so on Saturday we went into town to see Bodyworlds 2 at the Museum of Natural Science. Jose had seen the previous version that was at the museum two years ago, but this was the first time I’d seen it. It was a little weird, and a little creepy (after all, they are real human bodies that were once real people), but overall it was quite interesting. After that we had dinner at Star Pizza (which I love, but I do need to find some new restaurants in that part of town — I only go to the same three places over and over). We finished the evening back at Miller Outdoor Theater where there was a free taiko drumming show going on. It was a beautiful night for outdoor entertainment.
Yesterday Jose went flying with Becca, but they didn’t get far — the airport lost power again and therefore the gas pump didn’t work. They had only the gas that was already in the plane, so Jose flew a few touch-and-gos and they called it a day. Because he was done early, we had time to go running together before meeting Jen, Jason and Debbie for the final game of the Astros season.

I was a pretty horrible baseball fan this year — I think yesterday was only the 4th game I’ve been to all year. Compare that to previous years when I’ve averaged 15-20 games per season! The Astros had been mathmatically eliminated a few days earlier by a Brewers win, and the Braves were long out of contention, so the game was meaningless. Nonetheless, it was nice to see the Astros win. They ended the season 11 games above .500 and 3.5 games back in the wild card race. They actually only played 161 games — they missed one due to Hurricane Ike — but there was no need to make it up since it made no difference in the final standings. Oh well.

We finished the weekend having dinner with Nick, Heather, Melissa, Kelly and John. I spent only a few hours actually at home, so my apartment is still a wreck. Yep, cleaning is pretty low on my list of priorities. 😉