The “Final Frontier” and all that rot…

Hmmm. The romantically named Jules Verne turns out only to be little more than an extremely expensive disposable space freighter delivering bottled water form Milan, but still… kind of neat.

The shuttle Endeavour just safely lifted off from Cape Canaveral on a relatively rare night launch sending the new Japanese space laboratory and our very own Canadian “Dextre” (special purpose dexterous manipulator) into space. Here’s a diagram of it on the CSA website.

It’s an unfortunate shame that our tentative ventures in space have now become so blasé and largely commercialized for the most part.