Tweets from Space   - 534 Views,

For example, Massimino told his Twitter followers last night that it was “Hard to sleep last night after my spacewalk, images of the work and the views still vivid in my mind.”

Earlier he had gushed that he “Just flew over the US, Baja to Miami in about 10 minutes! Beautiful Day!!” after sharing that “At the end of my spacewalk, I had time to just look at the Earth, the most awesome sight my eyes have seen, undescribable (sic).”

But for legions of Massimino Twitter followers (308,941 at last count), far from being “undescribable”, or even indescribable, the descriptions that Massimino is sending from space seem almost, well, heaven sent.

Gushed one of Massimino’s followers, “Anything i say seems a little banal when one reads the tweets of @Astro_Mike from space!” Said another, “@astro_mike help us to understand the future, so we may enjoy the present, and dream of the future with clearer vision!”

There is no doubt that getting Twitter updates from space is very cool. And knowing how he does it (he actually emails them to someone at ground control, and they are typing them in to Twitter) doesn’t detract from the cool factor that much. Hey, it’s not Nasa’s fault that there is no reliable direct email-to-Twitter gateway!

All that said, Massimino’s average number of daily Tweets is way down from where it was pre-launch. “The work he needs to do as a member of the Atlantis crew and a spacewalker supersedes Twitter,” NASA spokesperson Bill Jeffs explained.

You can follow Mike Massinmino’s Tweets from space by going to http://twitter.com/Astro_mike.