One Small Tweet For A Man…

Astronaut and International Space Station resident TJ Creamer can now say he was the first to tweet live from space.

The astronaut sent the following tweet using the new Crew Support LAN installed by NASA.

“Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station–the 1st live tweet from Space! More soon, send your ?s”

The live tweeting was possible because NASA upgraded the astronauts’ Internet access. Before the update Creamer would email his updates to ground control and an employee would upload the tweets for him.

Creamer and others aboard the International Space Station are not directly accessing the Internet. Through the Crew Support LAN, the astronauts  can remotely access a computer on Earth that connects to the Internet and relays the screens back to the station.  And the astronauts are subject to the same user guidelines as other US government employees.

While Creamer is the first human to tweet from space, he is not the first Twitter user in space. The Mars Phoenix Lander explorer regularly updated followers on its exploit on the red planet. In fact, it used Twitter to announce it had found ice on Mars.

[Via CNet]