Revealed: @Astro_Mike Was Not Updating Twitter From Space, Nor Was He Doing It In Real-Time. Heck, It Wasn't Even Him!

Mike Massimino, an astronaut on space shuttle Atlantis, is going to have to do some explaining to the Twitter community when he lands today at Kennedy Space Center. Turns out Massimino wasn’t really tweeting from space on the @Astro_Mike account.

It was actually a NASA employee doing the micro-updating for him, and not even in real-time: Massimino writes his updates in space and then e-mails them to Houston. That means it often takes hours for updates to appear on the Twitter account, since e-mails are transmitted from the shuttle only a few times a day.

Not to blow my own horn here, but I figured everyone kinda knew it wasn’t actually Massimino tweeting from space. Isn’t it obvious that astronauts probably have better things to do than browsing the Twitter website every so often to fill in fans on what they’re doing? Granted, you could argue the same about everyone else on Twitter, but it’s still kinda of naive to think that astronauts have always-on Internet connectivity in orbit.

Either way, Etan Horowitz from the Orlando Sentinel burst at least 340K people’s bubbles today.

Update: Massimino actually revealed this himself some time ago. Guess that particular micro-message got lost in the real-time stream somewhere.

(Via The Next Web)