:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 11.03.2008 ::
:: Astronauts to Vote From Space Station ::
Space.com
By Tariq Malik
While most Americans will flock to the polls Tuesday to cast their vote for the next U.S. president, two U.S. citizens will beam their ballots down from the International Space Station as they fly 220 miles (354 km) above Earth.
Like all U.S. spaceflyers since 1997, NASA astronauts Michael Fincke and Gregory Chamitoff can vote in their local and national elections thanks to a handy Texas state law that ensures their ballots can be counted, even from space.
"So I'm going to exercise my privilege as a citizen and actually vote from space on Election Day," Fincke, the space station's Expedition 18 commander, told SPACE.com before he left Earth. "I think the candidates this year are exciting in and of themselves. But hopefully we get people to realize what a privilege it is, and they exercise and get a chance to vote."
Only four Americans in NASA's 50-year history have voted from space, largely because the Texas law allowing was passed just 11 years ago, said Nicole Cloutier-Lemasters, a spokesperson with NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. And just one of those four, now-retired spaceflyer Leroy Chiao, voted during a presidential election in 2004 while commanding the space station's Expedition 10 crew.
"I was so busy preparing for my ISS mission in 2004 that I almost forgot about the fact that I would be in space during that U.S. presidential election," Chiao told SPACE.com, adding that it was his wife Karen who remembered he'd be in orbit on Election Day. "As she and NASA looked into it, the process turned out to be fairly straightforward. Another astronaut had already voted from space earlier for a state election, so the law allowing this was already established. It was just a matter of applying it to the presidential election."
The 1997 Texas bill allowed NASA's first orbital voter David Wolf to cast his ballot from Russia's Space Station Mir, Cloutier-Lemasters told SPACE.com. Astronauts Michael Lopez-Alegria and Clayton Anderson also voted during their separate missions to the International Space Station in 2006 and 2007, respectively.
Fincke and Chamitoff have been encouraging the American people to remember that no matter which presidential candidate they choose, be it a ballot for Barack Obama (D-Ill.) of John McCain (R-Arizona), that they remember to vote above all else.
"Voting is the most important statement Americans can make in fulfilling a cherished right to select its leaders," Fincke said in a NASA TV video with Chamitoff. "So this Election Day, take time to go to the polls and vote. If we can do it, so can you."
posted by me
:: 11:11:00 PM [+] ::
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