Discovery's Surprise: Did Bat Hitch a Ride to Space?

I would tend to think if the bat didn't just let go, it would have lost its grip when the shuttle went supersonic, but....

The bat, seen clinging to the external fuel tank of the Space Shuttle Discovery before its launch on Sunday, apparently clung for dear life to the side of the tank as the spaceship lifted off.

And what a ride.

The shuttle accelerates to an orbital velocity of 17,500 milers per hour, which is 25 times faster than the speed of sound, in just over eight minutes. That's zero to 100 mph in 10 seconds.

Did it make it into space? No one knows yet. But photos of Discovery as it cleared the launch tower showed a tiny speck on the side of the tank. When those photos were blown up, it became apparent that the speck was a bat.

Flight director Paul Dye said no one has seen the bat since.

"I heard that it was clinging to the tank at liftoff, but I don't think anyone has seen it since," he said.

Launch controllers spotted the bat after it had clawed onto the foam of the external tank as Discovery stood at Cape Canaveral's Launch Pad 39A.

Is this that seasonal food item that shocked Teppy? Or was that a Moon Pie?

Nah, that was Mallomars. Whoopie Pies and Moon Pies are available year-round.

History channel. I still remember a Shakespeare "documentary" by them. They admitted Shakespeare wrote his own plays, but argued that he was also part of a Catholic conspiracy against the Tudors.

Poor little bat got disintegrated, methinks.

I just gave myself a heart attack here at work, thinking I'd screwed something up that I didn't. Like I needed that today.

I saw something similar on PBS. It was extremely speculative, with only the thinnest of evidence, accompanied by very selective reading of his texts.

The PBS show at least had some very good details on Elizabethan politics and culture.

EDIT: This is the show.

That reminds me of a Colin Wilson novel where the protagonists were going on and on in obvious soapbox mouthpiece fashion about how banal and uninspired Shakespeare's works were... plus they were totally written by Marlowe!

Is it evil of me to be so gleeful about someone who attacked H.P Lovecraft early on ending up writing Cthulhu Mythos stories to make ends meet?

I also saw something on the History Channel about the Freemasons, which was about 58 minutes of "Is it a conspiracy? Do they rule the world? Listen to what these people have to say about it!" followed by about two minutes of, "Nah, just some middle-aged suburbanites doing some silly rituals."

Still, HyFy stuff like Modern Marvels (which just had a show on Tesla) and Cities of the Underworld makes up for a whole lot of woowoo.

I also saw something on the History Channel about the Freemasons, which was about 58 minutes of "Is it a conspiracy? Do they rule the world? Listen to what these people have to say about it!" followed by about two minutes of, "Nah, just some middle-aged suburbanites doing some silly rituals."

Steve Martin and some people from SNL did a good parody of this sort of documentary back in the early '80s. It was a sketch called "Did Dinosaurs Build Stonehenge?" It had a bunch of ludicrous "evidence" that dinosaurs built Stonehenge, followed by the statement that since dinosaurs died out 63 million years ago, it wasn't possible.

Then they said, "Some of the rocks at Stonehenge were carried all the way from Wales. Did whales build Stonehenge?" Followed by some very crude animation of blue whales pushing giant stone blocks along the ground. Then they concluded that wasn't possible either, due to the thing that whales can't breathe on land (their weight collapses their lungs).