Pages 8-9 and following ones, I’d hoped to show off JAXA’s neutral bouyancy training pool (named “Weightlessness Environment Test System”, or WETS for short, which has to be someone having a joke) which is almost certainly the inspiration for this one. Unfortunately, it was heavily damaged during the Great East Japan Earthquake back in 2011, and so it was decomissioned shortly afterwards. That said, this pool’s 22-metre diameter gives it almost twice the volume of WETS, which was only 16 metres wide (but almost the same depth).
Page 25, I honestly would like to know how baby Asumi just… went out and bought a grip strength training thingy completely without her father’s knowledge.
Struggled a bit with this panel. I could guess what she was trying to say from the context but couldn’t make the words fit! I don’t think it helped that I had the word おしっこ in my head and some of those letters were there. In the end I realised that it was from もよおす ーー＞ もよおしちゃったら - “to feel (cal of nature)”
Has anyone tried space photography? The pictures in this week’s reading look very impressive! I met a group of people doing this when I visited Devils Tower in Wyoming.
Apparently to get really good pictures you can buy a device that rotates your camera at the same speed the sky rotates, allowing you to get long exposures without the stars swirling in the picture.
Not seriously enough that I can recall ever having done so, though my brother did manage to take this photo of the aurora we had here in Sydney a couple of weeks ago:
Page 37, the H4 rocket mentioned in the first panel is a fictional projection of Japan’s launch vehicles - the current model in the real world is still the H3. (Remember we saw an H-IIB at the school a couple of volumes ago - that was the previous model in the series.)
In the second panel of the same page, the 小笠原 islands are officially part of Toyko Prefecture - the ferry (the only way to reach the island) takes twenty-four hours to get there. Unless there’s a faster ferry in the Twin Spica world, they spent a day shipping all the kids to the island, gave them just long enough to watch the launch and not a second longer, then spent another day shipping them back again. In the real world, JAXA maintains only a tracking facility on the island; JAXA’s modern-day launch facility is on Tanegashima.
Page 45, it mildly amuses me that the ferry’s called さざなみ, considering the conversation that came up in the new vocab items thread here.
