Next week Anousheh Ansari aims to go where no woman has gone before. To the international space station? Well, women have certainly been there before, although the Iranian-American venture capitalist will be the first woman to pay her own way to the orbital outpost. No, we're talking here about the extraterrestrial blogosphere.
Reuters |
| Anousheh Ansari, space blogger. |
With backing from the X Prize Foundation, Ansari has already begun blogging from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan about the buildup to Monday's scheduled Soyuz launch. During her week on the space station, she intends to keep up with the blog entries, and send some podcasts as well.
"She will be e-mailing, and sending a select few digital photos," Peter Diamandis, the foundation's founder and chairman, told me today. He said the foundation is paying out $250,000 for the data/phone link on the station, which is an option offered for Space Adventures' private-passenger trips to orbit.
As Ansari herself told me earlier this week, her plans to conduct scientific experiments in space during her mission were somewhat short-circuited when the Russians named her to replace would-be Japanese space passenger Daisuke Enomoto last month. She didn't have time to do what she wanted to do, so her main mission is to share her experience in orbit with as many people as she can.
Diamandis said the X Prize blog and podcasts will serve as "her mechanism to get that experience out."
Ansari's online efforts are said to represent the "first blog from space," but as with many of the firsts in the history books, that all depends on how you define your terms.
For years, NASA astronauts have sent back dispatches from the station and the shuttle, as well as "letters home" from Russia's Mir space station. South African Internet tycoon Mark Shuttleworth kept up a "Captain's Log" before, during and after his own privately paid-for trip to the space station in 2002. But if you define a blog as more or less daily entries, addressed to an Internet-wide audience and arranged in reverse chronological order with comments from readers, the Anousheh Ansari Space Blog certainly promises to break new ground.
Podcasting is also a relatively new frontier for the final frontier: NASA has started offering podcasts and vodcasts (including an MP4 of the last weekend's shuttle launch), and Ansari's X Prize podcasts could push the envelope.
Diamandis said the podcasts will include recordings of Ansari's communication links with students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the International Space University, as well as the geeks at the Googleplex in Silicon Valley. (Google co-founder Larry Page, like Ansari, is a member of the X Prize Foundation's board of directors.)
In addition to the blog, Ansari has her own Web site with further background on her past accomplishments and future flight.
Ansari is best known as one of the backers of the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight, which was won by the SpaceShipOne rocket team on Oct. 4, 2004. Diamandis told me that Ansari will be involved in yet another Oct. 4 X Prize event this year: She's due to be present at the National Academy of Sciences on that date for an announcement relating to the long-simmering $10 million Genomics X Prize.
Ansari's "victory lap" will continue with an appearance at the X Prize Cup festivities in late October, Diamandis said. Among other things, she'll participate in educational activities expected to draw thousands of schoolchildren, he said.
All in all, it promises to be a busy month and a half for Anousheh Ansari, who is also involved in a venture to develop suborbital spaceships for tourist travel. Not bad for a beginning blogger. ...
