astronaut
08/20/2007
Hurricane Dean Seen From Space: "Holy Smokes!"
There is something about the way astronauts talk. From Neil Armstrong’s unexpectedly calm “one small step for man” speech on the lunar surface, to Apollo 13's casual, meiotic “Houston, we have a problem” when all hell was breaking loose, astronauts’ words always seem to possess an understated gravity -- maybe it’s the perspective of being high 200 miles above the earth, or maybe it’s simply being high in a capsule filled with oxygen. So when an astronaut exclaims “holy smokes,” you know something big is happening.
Such was the case with crew members aboard the International Space Station as they passed over Hurricane Dean, a potential Cat 5 storm passing by the island Hispanola on its way towards the Gulf of Mexico. External cameras captured footage of the hurricane from an altitude of 214 statute miles. Our astronaut summed up the storm's massive size with this litotic comment: “Yeah. Can’t miss that.”
