A new frontier: Astronaut using Twitter in space

— -- Astronauts are known for their pithy statements from space. Astronaut Michael Massimino is continuing that tradition — in an unconventional way.

Massimino, now in orbit on space shuttle Atlantis, is the first person to Twitter from space.

Despite a hectic schedule, Massimino — Astro Mike to his followers — has fired off nearly two dozen of the 140-character missives known as tweets, musing on such experiences as looking out the shuttle's windows.

Unlike the clipped, impersonal statements famously made by past astronauts, Astro Mike's tweets are reflective and personal.

"As I closed my eyes to sleep last night I thought, 'These eyes have seen some beautiful sights today,' " Massimino, 46, wrote in a tweet posted Wednesday.

Massimino's followers have catapulted from roughly 100,000 before his May 11 launch to more than 300,000, and the number grows "every hour," NASA spokeswoman Nicole Lemasters said.

During preflight training for his mission, which is devoted to upgrading the Hubble Space Telescope, Massimino used a handheld device to send many of his Twitter postings. Since reaching orbit, he has tapped his tweets into the shuttle's laptops and e-mailed them to Lemasters. She posts them to twitter.com/Astro_Mike.

"The one regret that I have when I look out the window and I see how beautiful the Earth looks … is that you can't share it with everyone," Massimino said during a news conference Wednesday. His twittering "is just an attempt at doing that."

In Massimino's tweets, he describes what he sees, what he's doing and — in a break from the stiff-upper-lip astronaut stereotype — his state of mind.

"Hard to sleep last night after my spacewalk, images of the work and the views still vivid in my mind," read a Monday tweet.

During this mission, Massimino, an astronaut since 1996, made two spacewalks to upgrade the Hubble. He also went on two spacewalks to fix the Hubble in 2002.

Massimino is not the first NASA space traveler to Twitter from space. The MarsPhoenix spacecraft, which landed on the Red Planet in 2008, had its own Twitter account, though postings like "Less than 20 days till I land on Mars!" were written by a NASA staffer.