Mir Burns Up Online
The re-entry of Russian space station Mir into the earth's atmosphere next week will be streamed live at Mirreentry.com.
The 140-ton space station is expected to enter the earth's atmosphere on March 20. One hundred tons of the station is expected to burn up in the atmosphere, while the remaining 40 tons will continue to break up and hit the South Pacific. The event is expected to be the largest celestial event since the Tunguska meteorite struck Siberia in 1908.
Mireentry.com was formed a month ago by Richard Citron, the Los Angeles attorney and entrepreneur who has been involved with over a 1,000 startups including, Spacehab and Kistler Aerospace.
Mirreentry will film the event from a plane approximately 200 miles from the descending space station. The company will be in constant contact via satellite phone with Russian Space Command, NASA, and United States Satellite Tracking Command, to make sure the plane stays close to Mir.
The event will be shot in high-definition by production company HD3 and edited onboard the plane. One of the HD3 cameramen is Bob Turr, who filmed the O.J. Simpson car chase in 1994.
Mirreentry selected NaviSite's streamOS architecture for the webcast because of its scalability. NaviSite's CDN partners are Digital Island, Enron, Evoke, Streaming Media Corporation, Speedera and Madge.web.
"This is our most challenging webcast ever," said David Gilbey, marketing director of NaviSite. Quality of service is not likely to vary geographically, Gilbey said. In November, the company served 9 million streams for a Madonna webcast.
Keynote is monitoring Mireentry's site traffic and stream performance data.
Mireentry's target audience - space buffs — have largely tracked the space station over its 15-year history through Web sites. While some re-entry footage will be made available to television news media, the main audience for the event is online. The company joins other destination sites such as Space.com that have attempted to capitalize on the demand for space content. NASA Web sites recorded 64 million hits a month last year.
Mireentry has partnered with Microsoft, Barnes & Noble, Iridium, and eBay. The company is negotiating a possible television documentary with the Discovery Channel. "The event itself is only the beginning of the content's lifecycle," said Mireentry executive producer Robert Belzer.
Keith Cowing of space policy analysis site, Spaceref.com, questions the public fascination with Mireentry. The large potential audience for the event contrasts with public enthusiasm for ongoing — but less spectacular — space projects such as the International Space Station, says Cowing. He adds: "The reality of future space exploration is astronauts in jumpsuits switching dials, but it's a big fireball which makes the news."