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Talk about Twitter’s reach growing.  Apparently it is now going into outer space.  NASA astronaut Mark Polansky will be commanding the upcoming mission to the International Space Station, and he just posted an invite on YouTube.  This invite, which was posted on NASA’s official YouTube channel, invited users, as well as Twitter folks, to be a part of his next mission by submitting questions through YouTube and then following updates via Twitter.

He asks that the questions be sent on a video (about 30 seconds long) and posted to YouTube, and then sent to his Twitter account (using the @reply method).  He will then respond to the question on the nationally broadcast NASA TV.

As one YouTube commentor put it, “I find it frightening that the first alien contact we might make could be a tweet.”  Well, they will probably surely wonder about a society that can only speak in 140 character or less, and uses a hell of a lot of weird acronyms.  Maybe we should send them the Guide to Twitter 101.

Actually, Polansky isn’t even going to be the first to be Tweeting from space.  Mike Massimo plans to Tweet away from the Space Shuttle Atlantis in under three days when it sets off on mission STS-125.

Trying to reach a larger audience, NASA has been reaching into modern consumer technology…making use of things like the web and social sites.  I have to agree with Jason Kincaid’s view in that at least the astronauts might have something educational to Tweet to us, instead of a lot of what many of hollywood flavors of the week are filling space with each day. 

I wonder if anyone we don’t expect will intercept and Tweet back?  Oh…that’s right…ET used a good old fashioned phone.

via: LAtimes