You've probably heard the news: there's a Twitterati orbiting around the Earth. Mike Massimino, one of the five NASA astronauts partaking in the eleven day long mission to repair and update the Hubble Telescope, has officially become the first person to tweet from the space shuttle Atlantis.

Technically, it's not like Mike can log into Twitter while checking out weekend pics of his NASA friends playing beer pong on Facebook or anything; he has to first send his tweets via e-mail to the Houston headquarters, from where the astronaut's messages are secondhandedly posted by the staff. According to this space tech blog:

"Internet access in space is a significantly different animal than here on Earth. The International Space Station has WiFi routers onboard, much like the ones in most businesses and homes. But those routers are typically used for local area wireless connectivity. Internet access - if it can even be called that - is heavily mediated by Mission Control for a variety of security and technical reasons."

But still, it's gotta be kinda exciting to be socially networked from where he is. For the record, the US space agency did successfully test out their wi-fi network (a.k.a Disruption-Tolerant Networking) last year and it may soon be put to widespread use in the near future. And we all thought Starbucks was gonna beat them to it.