May 12th 2009 is going down history books as another important milestone in Twitter’s journey as one of the most important social media services ever. NASA astronaut Mike Massimino became the first man to tweet from space as he sent a status update which reads:
“From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!”
Massimino is one of the seven astronauts abroad the space shuttle Atlantis who have been selected to perform spacewalks in the next 11 days to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope. Massimino, or more popularly Astro_Mike on Twitter, has been active on Twitter since April and already has 238,216 followers. In fact the followers increased by 720 while I was writing this short post!
NASA (yes, they are Twitter savvy too!) has put no limits on what Mike can tweet about, and this can be a great opportunity for Astronauts to give a first ever behind-the-scenes look at such high risk space missions to the mainstream media.
The power of those 140 magical characters has been taken outside the enclosure of our home planet. What can we expect next? A twitpic during the mission?
Why not, I say?
