OPINION
Tracking Columbia's Re-entry on Mobile Phones
07-02-2003
by Bernie Goldbach
When the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated while entering the earth's atmosphere, some people viewed the tragedy on their mobile phones.
Travelling north from Dublin one fateful Saturday afternoon, my mobile phone started telling me that Houston had a problem. During the next two hours, I got a steady stream of news items delivered to my Nokia 9210i Communicator. Most of the information came through Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) Web Services. Like several other mobile office workers, my Nokia phone was connected to an extensive global Weblog community.
I got the first news of Space Shuttle Columbia's disintegration as an SMS text from Gavin Sheridan, who put the chilling information on Gavin's Blog after he saw it on Slashdot.org, a hive of fresh information. "NASA lost communication with space shuttle Columbia shortly before its scheduled landing."
Then a trickle of e-mail began to arrive from Newzcrawler, an automated news aggregator. When Newzcrawler sits on a desktop computer, it dispatches e-mail news summaries at regular intervals. As long as my computer remains connected to my EsatBT DSL link, Newzcrawler's e-mail feeds me details derived from XML Web services.
Within a half-hour of the initial text, I received an image of the space shuttle Columbia's final vapour trail on the Nokia 9210i's screen. Columbia was the oldest in NASA's fleet and the first to enter the Earth's orbit in 1981. In 1999, Eileen Collins, a former T-38 instructor pilot with me, flew her in the first shuttle mission commanded by a woman.
By mid-afternoon in Ireland, the Kennedy Space Center announced it was impounding all flight data for an investigation into the apparent loss of the shuttle. The initial flow of news gave a mixed message. CNN reported that the shuttle broke up at 200,000 feet but both the Washington Post and the Boston Globe said the shuttle had landed.
Dave Winer, writing in his scripting.com weblog from California, found shuttle ground tracks extracted from a NASA plot plus a Doppler radar image that graphically animated the trail of metal debris. Dozens of pages erupted on Space.com, with retired engineers recalling the apparent damage inflicted on the shuttle's left wing on launch.
Jon Udell, a long-time Internet expert well regarded by Irish Flash developers, refers to this burst of thematic information as "NewsQuakes." Udell thinks of the widely distributed network of Weblogs as a series of hotspots. Because they are not mainstream sources, they highlight peripheral points that are valuable for their unique expertise. At crisis moments, the entire aggregated news flow dynamically distils to a single topic.
The news flow came primarily from a community of weblogs. A weblog is a simple, inexpensive tool to exchange communications. It is one of the most efficient technologies available. Its news aggregation capability is free and comprehensive.
Before Sky News carried the shuttle disaster as a bulletin, my Communicator had summarised NASA's "Current Status" Web page. The page summary happened because it I had previously set up a RSS (Really Simple Syndication) extract of the page to be done every 20 minutes. NASA status reports arrived as e-mail summaries, mailed from a home computer's always-on news aggregator.
The news aggregator said that the shuttle's angle of incidence had changed on re-entry, according to a Fox News story about tile damage. A Real Audio clip from the Voice of America played President Bush's memorable speech on the Nokia 9210i. And soon some eBay listings featured the sale of shuttle debris, even before the Associated Press reported that human remains had been found.
Just as there aren't many events that instantly bring tears to your eyes, there aren't many events in your life you can vividly remember years later. The photo of its final vapour trail is staying permanently on my Communicator's desktop.
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