Earth view...Astronaut style!

Written by Fox News on . Posted in Science

Publisher's note:  If Christopher Columbus were alive, he might say something like "che cosa; davvero; esci fuori della città."

Or maybe in English, "are you nuts?!" The bottom line is he believed the world was round and he proved it; however to watch the earth spin on its Axis in real time from one's living room?! I'm guessing he would have joined the naysayers of his day and helped locked you up in a 1492 straight jacket. However, that was then and this is now. As this Fox piece shows, we will soon be able to do just that.

Fox News: You might not have hundreds of thousands of dollars for a seat on Richard Branson’s private shuttle, but one enterprising outfit is about to offer the next best thing: the chance to see the Earth from space, from the comfort of your couch. With the aid of Russian space authorities, Vancouver-based UrtheCast (pronounced “earthcast”) will launch two cameras into orbit Monday with the immediate goal of streaming images of the Earth back home in near-real time. For free, Internet users will log on to UrtheCast.com anytime to see the beauty of the big blue ball we live on, as the cameras make the 90-minute revolution around Earth, 16 times a day. It's a sight few have ever seen before. “Ten years ago it would have been incredibly difficult to do this,” Scott Larson, CEO of UrtheCast, told FoxNews.com. But after three years of raising money and working with Russian and Canadian engineers and developers, the project is about to lift-off -- literally. The cameras will ride a Russian Soyuz rocket on Monday at 3:53 p.m. EST from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. You can watch it live on FoxNews.com.

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