NASA for iPhone – review

I gotta tell you something: American space organization NASA is not very impressive lately. But what about their iPhone app?

NASA is not impressive probably because USA is spending billions on wars and bailing out bankers with trillions of dollars. Anywho: Space Shuttles are being retired next year and next generation American human-carrying space rocket – Project Constellation – is starting operation at the earliest in 2014. In other words: Americans must greatly rely on Russian rockets to carry people to space.

Fortunately, apart from USA and Russia now also other countries are involved, including ESA (European Space Agency), Japan, India and China. Fortunately so called ISS (International Space Station) is operational whole time and always somebody is up there, so something is going on, although clearly mankind is slow with whole that space exploration thingy.

Recently NASA has just an app for iPhone:

Generally, as you can see above, this app is a just a bunch of pictures, videos and latest news related to space travel – quite boring. But one thing that we particularly like in this app is ability to see where, at given time, ISS space station is located:

Access to photos is also included, albeit a bit boring:

You can also watch videos:

Also news are available:

Conclusion: all in all we are disappointed with this app. We would like to see, apart from typical website-ish materials also some overview information like: how many people at given moment are in the space (not counting aliens), when next manned space rocket is starting, when next time people from space are coming and such stuff. It looks like NASA’s app is equally lackluster like their whole space program. That’s what sad about it – lack of progress. But China is not sleeping and it looks like it will be China that will have the first permanent base on the Moon…

Get it here (price: FREE):

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