Twitter Astronaut turns out to be tweeting via email

May 22, 2009 | Paul Boutin | Comments | |

The underscore in his username should’ve made us wary. Space Shuttle astronaut Mike Massimino, known as @Astro_Mike on Twitter, drew a third of a million followers for what most presumed were Massimino’s real-time tweets from space.

The Orlando Sentinel burst our balloon this morning by reporting how Massimino actually transfers his tweets from shuttle Atlantis’ orbit to Twitter’s servers in San Francisco.

Massimino writes his updates in space and then e-mails them to Houston, where a NASA employee posts them to his Twitter profile. That often takes hours because e-mails are only transmitted from the shuttle a few times a day.

Email batch jobs in 2009. Holy Usenet Archives! Next time, Mike, do what the private sector does: Ignore the IT guys and bring your own iPhone.

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About the Author, Paul Boutin

Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • GR
    Maybe you should have just payed attention to what @Astro_Mike himself said on the matter long before they launched. He addressed this on May 1st, before all this 'first twitter from space' silliness ensued. Instead, now you are trying to gain clicks with some made up pseudo-scandal.

    http://twitter.com/Astro_Mike/status/1676124868
  • If he had been carving his tweets into granite and sending them down to earth using skyhooks, would it have been an issue?
  • Not to me, it wouldn't have!
  • just to clarify, he did tweet that before they blasted off, right? http://twitter.com/Astro_Mike/status/1676124868
  • sean
    'Mike, do what the private sector does: Ignore the IT guys and bring your own iPhone.'

    hmmm I'm no astronaut but isn't the space shuttle a few THOUSAND miles out there? Not sure what kind of iphone you have Paul, but even you might have trouble getting a signal at those distances.
  • I certainly hope he's using topify.com to manage twitter by email ! :) http://bit.ly/gotopify
  • I agree with other posts, he was not trying to deceive. If you had FOLLOWED him you would have read his post about him having to do it that way. So you report on something you have no real knowledge about? Hmm typical blogger. I bet you read other blogs and then post it here as your own.

    On the flip side I am disappointed he had to twitter the way he did kind of made it not so interesting anymore
  • swag
    LOL. It's as if no one gives a crap if it's e-mail from space, but slap the "T" word on it and everyone is wetting themselves.
  • Facebook User
    Right! Sending email from space is still a pretty cool thing.

    And couldn't NASA have spared a few programming hours to write a quick email -> twitter gateway for Astro_Mike?
  • If:
    the NASA isn't capable of sending real-time Tweets (164 characters of data) to earth, 30 years after landing on the moon.
    How:
    was it possible to receive live TV images with sound from the moon?

    "That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind."
    Even a small step like Twitter micro blogging from space is not possible 30 years later.