I’d thought after the space shuttles retired, I’d be done chasing them… but then they announced their “retirement plan” would be moving them to various museums – Atlantis staying at KSC, but Discovery to the National Air & Space Museum’s annex outside of DC, Enterprise moving from there to the Intrepid Air & Sea Museum in NYC, and Endeavour heading out to California somewhere – all traveling via the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA), previously used to life Enterprise for test landings and retrieve orbiters that landed at Edwards.
To move a shuttle with the SCA, they tow the orbiter into this giant crane thing and hoist it up, then drive this specially-rigged 747 under it, and lower the orbiter onto the top and attach them. And then they fly the 747 with a frelling space shuttle orbiter on its back to wherever, and reverse the process. Check out the three days of work it took to get Discovery mated to the SCA in this spiffy 2-minute timelapse video!
Seriously, planes playing piggy-back. I had to see that in person. So, I knew I’d be finding somewhere to watch Discovery landing at Dulles, and it turned out the Udvar-Hazy Center, where she’ll be replacing Enterprise, is right next to the airport, and announced they’d be open to the public for watching the flyover and landing, as well as for the official welcome ceremony a couple days later, so I told work I’d be out most of that week and made plans to crash at my cousin’s house!
(There was also an official “NASA Social” (they decided to let Facebook and Google+ count, so can’t call them TweetUps anymore) which I didn’t get into, but that wasn’t going to stop me! (Or anyone else, apparently!))
As ridiculously excited as I was to see Discovery flying in on top of a 747 and hang out with spacetweeps all week, it’s also really sad. Putting these lovely orbiters in museums makes the end of the shuttle program seem real. The final flight was sad, but Atlantis was still intact and flying on her own… but Discovery’s been stripped down, engines and other components replaced with mock-ups, and carried and towed to her final destination… as much as it’s celebrated as a “welcome” or “retirement party,” it kind of feels more like a viewing on Tuesday and a funeral or wake on Thursday… D,: waaaah.
Just have to keep telling myself that it is retirement, and like many old people, she’ll be hanging around in the museum to educate and inspire generations of youngsters to do great spacey things!
Flyover
We were told they’d do one big, looping flyby for photo ops with various landmarks and monuments before coming in for landing, so we knew we were going to get two pretty nice passes, but didn’t know exactly how close or where, or how much of the landing we’d be able to see. So everybody was terribly excited when we first caught sight of that double silhouette, and it appeared to be heading right for us!
And then there was a great deal of screaming and cheering as she flew right over our heads!
We waited excitedly for the piggy-back planes to come back around and land…
This time around they flew more in front of us than directly over us.
*squee!*
At which point we realized the SCA didn’t have her landing gear down, so she couldn’t be landing then, as we’d thought… We were gonna get another pass! We still weren’t completely sure what we’d be able to see when she did aim for the landing strip, but then, after another long loop around, we caught sight of this:
Sad to think that was the last time we’ll see Discovery flying. 🙁
After that I headed inside to check out Enterprise before they moved her out of her long-time residence, and take a peek around the rest of the museum.
She looks enormous from this angle!…Not so much from this one.
At some point, somebody mentioned we could go up in the tower to the observation deck, so we did, and guess what we saw?!
Discovery on the SCA! And a passenger plane landing right by them! And over to the left, the crane they’ll use to de-mount Discovery!
Swag Swap Dinner
Between the folks that were actually part of the official NASAsocial and the herd of us that just showed up and declared it a #RogueTweetUp, there were rather a lot of space tweeps in the area to welcome Discovery and give Endeavour a proper send-off! We thought we should have one big gathering at some point while we were all more or less in one place, so on Wednesday, the day between Discovery’s arrival and the welcome ceremony, after most folks spent the day sightseeing in DC, we made one massive dinner reservation and took over like half of a lovely Italian restaurant – family style, like the big nerdy space family we are!
Since many tweeps had brought little bits of swag to share, whether extras from prior tweetups or places of employment (NASA centers or otherwise) or other random geeky events, it had been declared this gathering would be the ideal time to swap some swag! (Thanks to @KelleyApril and @LibbyDoodle for organizing everybody and making the reservation!)
Official “Welcome Discovery” Ceremony
The next morning it was back to the Udvar-Hazy Center to welcome Discovery to her new home! I was up and out pretty early, but detoured to pick up @fedward and @EmilyKnits from the Metro, and then some very necessary caffeine from the Starbucks, so by the time we got there Enterprise (and half a gazillion people) were already out behind the hangar waiting for Discovery. I made my way to just about the front, and found AstroTimmy! (and @Stephonee, of course!)
Soon they began to tow Discovery around from her hiding place…
Discovery accompanied by a parade of her astronauts!…and followed by her support crew.
She was welcomed by the Marine Drum and Bugle Corps, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, Astronaut/Senator John Glenn, other distinguished speakers, and thousands of adoring shuttle lovers!
Enterprise and Discovery reunited*ShuttleSnuggle* Crazy how worn Discovery looks next to bright shiny Enterprise!
”I
Eventually, it was time to move Discovery into the hangar, so they pulled Enterprise back out of the way, and then towed Discovery in!
But her tail wasn’t quite lined up right with the taller slot of the hangar door, so they had to back up and try again!
…and this time, they got it perfectly!
Popped inside then, and it was too crowded to stay long or see much, but I did get a quick glimpse of Discovery safely tucked into her new home! I’ll definitely have to go back sometime soon (and drag my Dad along) to hang out with this lovely orbiter more, and explore the rest of the museum properly!
SpaceTweeps are fun!
Most of us were planning to leave Saturday morning, so Friday evening a herd of us gathered once again… not quite as large a crew as the Swag Swap dinner, but a good bunch of very awesome people went out for drinks, and then gelato! And then we just kept chatting outside the gelato place for ages. 🙂
Well, I sure didn’t expect to get into another NASAtweetup so soon after a launch tweetup, but I don’t think I could ever bring myself to not try if there was any chance I could make it, and what do ya know? I got another of those lovely emails with “CONFIRMATION” in the subject line!
I wasn’t familiar with Langley Research Center before this (and was momentarily slightly disappointed to discover it had nothing to do with the CIA 😛 ) but this was remedied promptly upon arrival, as Charlie Harris, Langley’s Director of Research, welcomed us with an overview of the center.
A few tidbits he shared:
Langley Research Center (LaRC) was one of the first to aeronautics research centers! It predates NASA itself by more than 40 years, having been established by NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) in 1917.
Viking (first Mars lander) was a Langley project
The technology to safely land the Mars Science Lab Curiosity rover was developed at LaRC and they’re now researching to how to land humans on Mars (requires 100 times the mass we’ve ever landed on Mars before)
Collaborating with Sierra Nevada on developing a new shuttle-esque commercial launch vehicle to service ISS
Langley researchers were the first to identify the hole in the ozone layer!
Once we were thoroughly welcomed and impressed, we loaded up the bus and went to the hangar, where we paused for the now traditional group photo before splitting into two groups. My group started with atmospheric researcher Mike Obland to learn about Airborne Science at Langley. My initial mental picture of a mad scientist titrating something in the back of a Cessna and dropping things out the window aside, it’s pretty cool. They outfit these little planes with a bunch of scientific instruments, and fly around collecting data, which they use to study smog, weather, climate change, forest fires, etc!
Then the groups switched, and mine went over to engineer Bruce Fisher for the Flight Services overview. He told us more about the aircraft in the hangar, as well as the hangar itself. He pointed out this weird orange crane on tracks on the ceiling – and what it was used for, it turns out, was to practice docking procedures, before there were computer simulators! They’d actually hoist up two mock-up modules/capsules, and the astronauts who would have to maneuver them into position for real in space, later on, would practice docking suspended in mid-air in this very hangar! Before Houston became took over that end of things, all the early astros trained at Langley!
After the hangar, we headed over to the Reid Conference Center, where we had lunch and heard from Astronaut Susan (Still) Kilrain all about living and working in space! She flew on STS-83 and STS-94, which were actually the same mission with the same crew, but had a fuel cell problem the first time around, so the mission got cut short (4 days). But the mission was deemed “too important not to do” so they turned it around and re-launched 90 days later!
“There is a restroom all the way up the elevator before you get into the shuttle. They have determined that it is impossible for a female to use that restroom, and I have so proven them wrong. …a Navy pilot can pee just about anywhere.”
They test you for claustrophobia by sticking you inside a beachball sort of thing, turning all the lights out, and leaving you there without telling you for how long. (She fell asleep.)
They flew a stationary bike (with a seatbelt) for exercise… so one day she biked around the world! It took an hour and a half.
Her job when not flying as as CapComm. Apparently the only people allowed to talk to an astronaut in space is another astronaut or the Flight Surgeon, so that was her when someone else was in space! Astronauts do get to call their family twice while their in space, and email, but everything is monitored (to make sure they don’t get too stressed or upset). If your family writes to you while you’re in space and says you’re dog died, they won’t tell you until you get back.
After her presentation and some questions from the tweeps, we got to take pictures with her and get her autograph! Then we were off again, and split back into two groups for the next tours.
My new group started in the U.S National Transonic Facility Pressurized Air/Cryogenic Wind Tunnel… which basically means they can adjust the pressure and temperature of the air running through the wind tunnel, so the molecules are closer together in proportion to scaled-down models, for more accurate results! (I think I understood that, anyway!) We got to see the shop in which they make the models to test, the wind tunnel itself (from the outside), and the control room.
The facility manager, Roman Paryz, showed us around, and also gave us a little cryogenics demonstration with a bucket of liquid nitrogen! He dipped a partially-inflated balloon (which appeared to deflate as the air inside cooled and compressed, then “re-inflated” as it warmed back up), a leaf (which got very brittle and snapped into pieces), and a cupful of Cheez-Itz (which were delightfully cold and still tasty)! Pouring liquid nitrogen out on the floor was really cool too – like tiny fog, it formed a roiling layer of cloud about 6 inches deep, skimming over the floor!
Then he asked if we had any questions, or anything else we wanted to see frozen. I thought about what might be interesting to dip in liquid nitrogen… and remembered I had a pair of clean (brand new) socks serving as camera lens cases in my bag, so I pulled one out and offered it up! I was slightly surprised, and everyone was amused when he actually accepted, and dunked it! I had kind of hoped it would make like the leaf and shatter so I’d have little sock fragments to share, but apparently acrylic knits don’t react so entertainingly… just got kind of frosty!
Next, we walked over to Structures and Materials lab, where we learned about some (*gasp!*) structures and materials they’re working on there! One was the Inflatable Reentry Vehicle Experiment (IRVE-3), which will allow us to land bigger, heavier payloads on planets with an atmosphere (such as Mars), by using an inflatable heat shield (a wide cone of concentric inflatable rings, with a thermal protection system wrapped around it)! Normal, rigid heat shields, can only be as big as the launch vehicle is wide, thus limiting the amount of mass it can safely land. But a heat shield that can fly packed in and deploy when it’s time for reentry can be much larger, with more surface area for air resistance and heat distribution, so we can send more stuff!
Lucky for us, Dr. Mia Siochi didnt realize that her demonstration wasn’t actually intended for us (apparently there was a group of bigwigs coming through after us), so we got to hear about some really fascinating emergent materials, which NASA is trying to accelerate the development of. Different ways of constructing metal parts, carbon nanotubes (forming a material 20 times stronger than carbon fiber materials, and still lighter), self-healing materials (they took it to the gun range to test how it’d heal around bullets!), and engineered surfaces (minimizing friction to improve aerodynamics… or super RainEx)… seriously cool stuff to a nerd like me!
Then we got to go in a model lunar habitat! It’s inflatable too, so it could be bigger than the launch vehicle would otherwise allow, and on the moon or anywhere without an atmosphere, normal air pressure on the inside would hold it in place! A bunch of those connected together on the moon would make a pretty sweet place to live!
The last stop on our Langley tour was the Landing Impact Research/Hydro Impact Basin Facility, to see a test drop of the Orion capsule! The structure is called the gantry, and I guess it’s basically a stationary crane (though it looks more like a giant swingset), which they use to lift up air/space craft and then drop them, to see how they hold up when falling/landing/crashing at various speeds/angles/rotations/etc. It’s where Neil Armstrong learned to land on the moon! (A real-life simulator, like the docking crane in the hangar.) Since then, however, they dug the Hydro Impact Basin, to test water landings.
For this test (the third), an engineering model of Orion was suspended from the gantry tilted slightly forward (leading with its side, rather than full on the heat shield), and pulled back so it would swing down to the basin, going 22mph horizontally when it was released from its bracket.
We watched as they drew it back and up, then let it swing, released from the bracket over the water, and then a huge splash!
It seemed to strike the water pretty much level, and even tipped back a little, but its forward momentum was great enough that as it bobbed in the water, it also plowed through it and gradually tipped forward, rolling over/through the crash barrier, and eventually settling into “Stable 2” – NASA-speak for upside-down!
We watched as the tidal wave of displaced water approached and receded, and a dude in a little raft paddled out and rigged some sort of loop around the capsule, which a little crane then used to flip Orion back upside-up. We hung out there a while, and eventually hopped back on the bus and returned to the little cafeteria where we had started the day to wrap things up.
But turns out, the wrap-up didn’t have to be the end! It was the end of the official tweetup, but Langley Research Center has its own little actual bar called Afterburners, and our lovely tweetup hosts and another NASA guy invited any tweeps who could/wanted to stay a little longer to join them there for “unofficial debriefing” over drinks and snacks! Of course, I wasn’t about to turn that down, (and they even said my Dad could join us if he wanted, so I called him and he did) and a small herd of spacetweeps and NASA employees and a bonus Daddy got to sit around chatting for a bit, complete with free beer!
NASA sure does know how to show a geek a good time! <3
Before Endeavour had even vanished aglow into the cruelly low ceiling of clouds on her final [operational] flight, STS-134, I knew I had to try to come back for STS-135. No, really, I knew I would come back to see Atlantis launch, one way or another. I did apply for the tweetup, of course, but as expected, did not get in. (Even if they didn’t automatically eliminate folks who’d already made a launch tweetup, there’s no way I’d get that lucky twice in a row!) I registered for a chance to purchase tickets for one of KSC’s public viewing areas as well, but didn’t win that lottery either. Undeterred, as soon as they set the target launch date, I started figuring out travel potential travel options and kept looking for any available tickets. After all, this was the last space shuttle launch ever. It wasn’t like there was going to be another chance to catch one, and I did not intend to pass it up if I could help it!
I told my Dad that I meant to go back down, expecting him to understand, if not actually join me again… but he kinda flipped out on me instead, so I had to let it drop for a while. He eventually came around and did decide to join me if he could make it a work trip again, so for the third time in as many months, I kicked the plan-making into high gear!
One of the crazier things I’ve done
For the last few launch tweetups, since they’re two-day events and tweeps come from far and wide for them, people have started a bit of a tradition of getting groups together to rent vacation houses for the week. As I’ve mentioned, my uncle (who works on the shuttle) and aunt live nearby, so for both of the previous trips, we-and-then-I just stayed with them. However, I felt like I was both wearing out my welcome and missing a-whole-mother element of tweetuppy goodness, so I decided to look into a shared rental for round three.
The fine folks at NASA did invite tweeps who had been at the 133 or 134 tweetups but hadn’t make it back for their actual launches to come back to watch this one from the press site with the 135ers, which was nice. Would have been nicer if that included me, but it did mean @Stephonee and several others we now knew would have a very good reason to make the trip, so we decided to try to get a house together (which took nearly as much convincing Daddy as the trip in the first place, but once again, he did eventually agree, if only so I wouldn’t be stranded if he needed to go off to do worky things), so Steph and I started looking for a good one.
We both put in so much time and effort and (being the organizational nerds we are) spreadsheet work, just in the preliminary scouting of what rentals were cheapish, could accommodate several unrelated people, and were still actually available, that we felt compelled to share all that research with the 135 tweetup attendees and the rest of the alumni and other space tweeps who’d be looking for places to stay that week.
Get ready, here comes the crazy part…
Somehow, for some now-unknown reason, we came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea and just go ahead and organize everybody’s housing who wanted us to.
O.O
Yup. And we did. We figured we’d maybe get enough alumni and a few of the new group to fill one or two big houses, maybe three. So we compiled our lists, put the word out, and started collecting info from folks who were interested. And the response was… impressive. Thankfully, It occurred to me early on that this was going to involve a crazy-ass-ton of email, so I snagged a new gmail account just for this… and boy was I glad I did.
As the first bunch of people indicated interest, the info we gathered seemed rather haphazard, so I made a survey/form thing to standardize it and make sure we got what we needed to know the first time and not have to email back and forth a thousand times. Then, our offer the link to the form got tweeted to the masses… over 100 responses!
So we were really in it now. D: And we had just under a month to work with, before people would start arriving!
Mad scouring of the interwebs, half a godzillion emails and phone calls to property owners, and 3 massive drowning-in-data spreadsheets, and we started piecing things together, forming strangers from all over the world, by the half dozen, into groups of temporary roommates, finding them houses and condos to rent, and facilitating communications and/or transactions to seal the deal.
Of course, it being summer in a vacation spot, and oh yeah, the little matter of an expected million people converging on the area for the same reason we were, finding available rentals on short notice was not exactly cake-like. Also, my computer up and died (the rest of the way) a week before we left, which didn’t exactly help! But we did it. It took us a while, but we did it. Not everyone who expressed interest ended up joining a tweetup house, but in the end, we had organized or helped coordinate 9 houses, accommodating over 60 tweeps altogether!
#SerenityHouse
The first time the idea of getting a shared rental for the 135 launch came up, long before any of it was actually decided (possibly while we were still at the 134 tweetup?) the conversation went like this:
Steph: “So you realize if we get a house together, it has to be called #SerenityHouse, right?”
Me: “Of course.”
Tweetup group houses traditionally have names, and being the domain of spacetweeps, they’re usually space themed and hashtagged. When we decided that we were actually going to go the rental house route, it was not even a question that ours would be named after our favorite fictional spaceship!
And oh was it shiny.
It was a little farther away from KSC than we wanted, way down at the southern tip of Merritt Island. And I do mean way. way. down. At the very end of the island. It tapers down to a skinny little spit of land between two rivers the farther south you get, and by the time you get to where this house is, it’s only wide enough to fit one house across, plus the road to get to the next one. It’s not even a road, technically, but a private driveway to reach the last 10 or so houses… only 3 of which are farther than ours.
It has a dock on both sides, and I think it was just about as far out to the end of the main one as from one river to the other… crazy.)
The owners are apparently really fond of spiral stairs and turquoise glass block, which I didn’t know existed, but they managed to not only find but incorporate into pretty much every room in the place!
Besides Daddy and I and Steph, the “crew” of #SerenityHouse also included Steph’s boyfriend @_caturday, a couple of Steph’s friends and their munchkin, and fellow tweetup alumni @JackDearlove, @DrLucyRogers, @genejm29, and @RobPegoraro. There was a great deal of awesome, smart, and snark going on in that house!
We ended up getting the master bedroom, which turned out to be the whole top floor! It was pretty much enormous… and strangely devoid of furniture.
(That counter wrapping around the glass block wall continues about 5 more feet to the left and ends with a minifridge and bar sink… add a microwave and you’d have got a killer studio apartment! The stained glass door leads out to a deck and stairs to the roof, the windows to the right are actually giant screened-in sliding doors, and there’s another screened-in balcony opposite them! Insane!)
The views were incredible. I’m afraid to even wonder what this place is worth?! I seriously want to know what the folks we rented it from do for a living! And yet the weekly rental was pretty reasonable for a group!
Obviously, I did not particularly want to ever leave.
However, we did, of course. Several times in fact! 😛 (and then once at the end, when we didn’t go back!)
Pre-Launch Wanderings
Most folks, including us, got into town sometime Wednesday. The tweetup started Thursday, but those of us not attending had a day to hang out before the launch, so when we got to the house around 11 Wednesday night, I wasn’t too concerned about getting to sleep… and thus was still awake and tweeting at 3:30, when I discovered that @Ruthie147 had never gotten connected with a ride from her hotel to KSC. It wouldn’t have been hard to find her a carpool even on short notice, except that, being from Ireland, she needed to leave rather early to hit the international badging place before heading to the regular tweetup check-in, and it seemed like most of the other international tweeps had either been around for early registration or were coming from the opposite direction, and nobody else was heading out that early – the sort of early that my “late” was rapidly turning into – so I just drove up and took her over myself.
Once she got her super special international visitor’s badge and we found some other tweeps she could catch a lift with to the regular check-in and on to the press site, I headed back, detouring to a Starbucks to make use of some of Ruth’s overly generous gas money (and to mollify Daddy, who was less than thrilled upon waking up to me and his car being gone). Back at the house, there was breakfast, squeezed a bit of work in, some twittering, some puttering, and then we gathered the troops and headed off to Fishlips for lunch!
Space tweeps, assemble!ThinkGeek’s AstroTimmy!
The majority of the afternoon was spent scouting for locations from which to watch the launch. (I bought Causeway tickets from a guy on CraigsList who seemed legit, but he’s either a complete moron, or was indeed a scammer, as he claims he filled out the shipping form wrong, so they couldn’t get to my house before we left, and he supposedly couldn’t get them back to re-send them to my aunt’s either. He *says* he’ll send my money back… I really hope he does… grr.)
We eventually decided on the beach in Cape Canaveral (just down the street from a few of the tweetup houses!) which wouldn’t have quite as good a view as Titusville probably did, but there were already so many people camped out there we knew we’d never get a spot on the bridge for the clear line of site, so we opted for infinitely less crowded, easier access, and a much shorter drive. That settled, we headed over to Cocoa and had dinner with my aunt and uncle.
One Last Launch…
While everyone else started their day before it was actually day time, having to be in their launch viewing locations hours in advance, Dad and I had nowhere to rush to, so I slept until a rather lovely 8:30 or so, got ready and gathered my things at a leisurely pace, and we drove up to the Cape in very minimal traffic, parking at a tweetup house and walking down to the beach around 11.
We deployed chairs, tripodded camera, radio, and even found some open wifi to watch NASAtv, and waited to see if the rather testy weather would permit the launch. Part of me was hoping for a delay, so I could have another day or two to try to get tickets for a closer view. It really didn’t look like the weather was going to cooperate, but at the last minute, the clouds broke up just enough and the wind calmed down just enough, and they decided to go for it! Then, with 31 seconds to go, a surprise hold. For two minutes, I was sure it was going to be a scrub… but then countdown resumed, and 30 seconds later, the Space Shuttle left Earth one last time.
(Darkened and upped the contrast on this one so you can actually make out the shuttle a bit.)
Obviously, we didn’t have nearly as gloriously close a view as I did last time.
I didn’t want to watch the whole thing through my viewfinder, so my blind-shooting camera didn’t quite keep up…
…but it was awesome, I promise! 😀
Though not as close as I would have liked, our vantage point on the beach did have one advantage – while the clouds again impeded the view from KSC much too quickly, we were far enough away to see her pop out the top and peek-a-boo through the less-dense clouds for almost a minute before she faded into the haze and distance!
We stopped for coffee and the obligatory RonJon’s visit on the way home, hoping to wait out the traffic (which was decidedly worse than it had been on the way in), but it didn’t really work. At this point I finally realized this trip was the ultimate License Plate Game opportunity, and started playing as we plodded toward “home”. (I got 20some just on that drive, and ultimately hit the mid-40s… probably would have won if I’d started playing on the drive down!)
Between the complete gorgeous epicness of watching a space shuttle launch, and the leftover sleepyness from the previous couple days, the rest of that afternoon didn’t quite stick in my memory, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t really do much anyway. There may have been a dollar store involved.
SpaceTweeps Rock – Part 1
We went out for an earlyish dinner with my aunt and uncle, but I wasn’t really hungry yet, and when we got back to the house, a few of the housemates went out to a post-tweetup dinner. It was kind of awkward initially, as we kind of landed in a booth, from which it was hard to join any of the other conversations, but eventually I got up and “lurked strategically” so as to get absorbed into one conversation or another (my version of “social skills”).
I ended up talking with a lovely table of folks I realized had to be the residents of #NewFrontiersHouse (the arranging of which had been rather an adventure, but came together quite well at the last minute). And then I introduced myself…
Holy wow. Spacetweeps know how to make a girl feel appreciated. I figured some portion of people I’d helped find a place would, upon finding out who I was, thank me, and maybe one or two would offer to buy me a drink… but I never expected them to announce it to the whole group or give me an actual frakking round of applause in the middle of a restaurant! (I also got dinner, a whole lot of raving about how great their house and group turned out, and the offer of a youngest child!) Hehe. After all the drama between that landlord and finding enough people to take a longer rental, I was super glad they were happy with the place, and they did turn out to be an exceptionally fun group!
And now for some fictional spaceship.
Saturday we decided to use my free pass to the KSC Visitor’s Complex from the 134 tweetup, since I hadn’t gotten over there on either of those trips, and we don’t expect to come down a 4th time this year, before it would expire! We had spent a day and a half wandering there when we came on vacation a little over a year ago, so there wasn’t a whole lot we hadn’t seen, but there was a new Star Trek exhibit, and we were hoping to catch one of the “Astronaut Experience”s, which ended up not working timing-wise, but we did get to wander around a bit and check out the Trek stuff!
Main EngineeringResistance is futile.Phasers and miscellanyCaptain’s chair.Hmm… don’t actually remember whose spaceship this is. o.0
The panels behind the ship are a timeline… everything from the beginning of the space program through the present to the significant events of every Star Trek show and movie. It was very cool to read, but there was so much (the picture only shows a little more than half the wall of panels!) that I couldn’t get through it all without eating up our whole day… wonder if it’s published on the innertubes somewhere so I can read it sitting down? 😛
DRAGONS!!! Er… just the one.
Next stop, it was back to non-fiction spaceships, stopping at SpaceX to see the Dragon capsule!
SpaceX’s building was right next to the Air Force Space and Missile Museum History Center, so of course we popped in there too, but it’s just one big room with everything on the walls, so it didn’t take long to make the circuit and see what there is to see.
SpaceTweeps Rock – Part 2
From there we headed back to the house, and Dad went off to Tampa to meet up with a boat or two for work, since I was planning on hitching a ride with some housemate or another to #EndlessBBQ and hanging there for the evening… only I somehow missed everyone leaving, and found myself stranded there, a solid half-hour drive from the shindig. I knew there were plenty of people staying reasonably close to where I was, but it turned out everyone had either already left, or had a full car!
After a bit of frantic twittering, looking for anyone who was still heading that way, a couple guys who were already there were actually considering driving all the way down the island and back to pick me up and bring me to the party! Then they decided, “Call a cab, we’ll pay for it.” O.O I figured, what the heck, and went along with this wacky plan.
Turns out, this wacky plan was far from being the wackiest part of this wacky plan… that award goes to the cab driver… I gave him directions to the end of the driveway-road, rather than the actual house, and he still barely found it, and then did not shut up the entire drive. -_- He was nice enough, I guess, but went on and on about every gorram thing, bouncing between very Florida-hick-ish, decidedly creepy, perfectly reasonable, and garden-variety annoying, for 19 slow miles in a minivan that smelt of cigarettes and God-knows-what. But he got me there in one piece, so okay. I was definitely thrilled to scramble out of that car as soon as we pulled into the driveway though!
The fare came to $60some, and I was thinking there were probably like five people in on the plan, intending to chip in a couple bucks, and I was gonna get stuck paying the difference (or feeling really guilty when some poor unwittingly generous soul felt obligated to cover it)… but it turns out, the hatchers of said wacky plan had actually temporarily commandeered the sound system, made an announcement explaining what was up, and then passed a bucket around! They actually collected more than enough to cover the fare and tip the crazy driver! (Who got out and seemed to hang around a while, though I ducked into the crowd as soon as possible so didn’t stay to find out how long.)
There was a pool, live music, and of course plenty of food and beverages, but [besides the top-notch company] the real hit of the party was taking pictures of the moon with our cellphones! (We are space geeks, after all!)
Yes, I really did take that picture with my phone… and a little help from @priesett‘s 10-inch-diameter telescope! (Just holding the phone camera over the eyepiece!) That picture’s not even the half of it though – in person, the detail was absolutely incredible. And when pointed at Saturn, you could actually make out the shape of the planet and its rings with that sucker! Crazy awesome. (Now I want one.)
I’m not typically much for big crowded parties, but when it’s a crowd of SpaceTweeps, it’s sure to be a good time! It’s still kind of mind-blowing to me that a crowd of people who, for the most part, I have never met, and many of whom I haven’t even really talked with, would collectively give upwards of $70 just to bring me to a party! But I’m very glad they did! It was a ton of fun!
SRB Retrieval
For those who aren’t NASA geeks: The Space Shuttle consists of an Orbiter (the plane-like ship containing crew and cargo), an orange External Tank, and two white Solid Rocket Boosters. A few minutes after launch, the SRBs are jettisoned and fall back to Earth, and the External Tank does the same once it reaches orbit. The Orbiter, obviously, is the part that stays in space a while, orbiting the planet, and the External Tank burns up in the atmosphere, but the SRBs, since they break off sooner/lower, land in the ocean intact, and a pair of ships, Freedom Star and Liberty Star, find and fetch them to be refurbished and reused.
Of course, these SRBs won’t be recycled for another shuttle launch, but they were retrieved nonetheless. The ships were supposed to be coming back to Port Canaveral sometime Sunday, and we didn’t have to leave until Monday, so we decided to go see them come through the canal! Unfortunately, one got back Sunday morning before we got up, but the other was still expected to get there in the early evening, so my Dad, aunt, uncle, and I went to Fishlips for dinner (which is right on the canal, and we got a table by the window).
Halfway through dinner, my ears catch someone at the table behind me talking about #EndlessBBQ! I turn around and exclaim, “I was there!” and discover it’s @KelleyApril! (Who I hadn’t met in person yet, and was seated so I hadn’t seen the NASA meatball temporary tattoo on her face when we came in, so I didn’t connect the girl eating dinner with her family to the picture on my Twitter feed!) Turns out she had had the same idea, but we eventually heard that the other ship was having engine issues and wouldn’t arrive until late that night, so we had to give up on that.
However, I found out that both ships would be going through the lock the next morning, and I convinced Dad to stop on our way out of town!
Freedom Star was in the lock when we got there.
We watched them guiding the first SRB out to Liberty Star, which had already passed through the lock.
They went through the lock single file, and once they were through, attached each SRB to the side of one of the ships.
The lock had walkways over the water at all sorts of odd angles, so I ran around taking pictures from different vantage points for a few minutes, and then we left, timing our exit so we would be crossing the one highway bridge just as Liberty Star would be coming out onto that bit of river!
Liberty Star heading for KSC with the VAB in sight!Bye bye SRB!
And then the trees invaded my view as we drove away, and 18 hours or so later, we got home. Another lovely sort-of-#NASAtweetup adventure concludes!
Apparently, I fell asleep as soon as I got into bed, without managing to turn off the light, or take off my glasses… or set the alarm… But miraculously woke up right on time anyway. (Right on time being like, 2:30am!) I got ready, snagged some coffee my aunt had very kindly made for me before she went to bed, loaded my junk into the borrowed minivan, and headed off to KSC one last time!
There was no “twent” this time, but there are two sets of bleachers on the press site that we were welcomed to use, so I claimed a spot on the one that had very convenient desky/tabletop surfaces for each bench row, and set up camp for the morning. Then around 5 we went down to the road to see the AstroVan coming through… again.
We waved, and definitely saw a hand inside the van wave back! 😀
Best of all, after dropping off LCC-bound folks, they continued on in the right direction! No U-turn this time! Yay!
It was odd being out and about in the middle of the night and there being so many people around, including a whole mess of news crews gearing up for the launch. Even stranger, and totally awesome, was there being programming for us tweeps at that hour! After the AstroVan pass, we were instructed to go to the press briefing room where we had waited out the storm, for a presentation on STORRM! (heehee.)
The metal box you see in the front there is the STORRM module (Sensor Test for Orion Relative navigation Risk Mitigation… basically a nifty new docking camera/navigation sensor system), a twin of which is flying on Endeavour to test it out. The folks on the dais told us all about the history of the program and the technology, a lot of which is the software analyzing the data from the cameras and sensors, and the tests they’ll be doing on STS-134.
We got to chat with them a bit after, and watch Endeavour’s crew suiting up on NASAtv too. By the time we left, the sun was coming up, and the shoreline was filling with tripods claiming front row spots.
The next couple hours were spent charging batteries, acquiring/consuming breakfast and coffee, keeping tabs on NASAtv and the interwebs for the status of the crew and shuttle preperations and the weather forecast, and mostly just hanging out, getting to know the tweeps around us (including Nina and Chris, who got engaged in front of the countdown clock the morning of the first launch attempt!).
The weather looked questionable at times. There were a couple of technical glitches, but they were all fixed or determined to not be a problem. I listened to the radio on the bleachers as long as I dared, started my cellphone recording video and propped it up, and headed out to the shore to find a spot to watch the launch!
T minus 3 minutes, 59 secondsOne last shot of Endeavour on the launch pad.
3…2…1…
I had had to leave the tripod behind, as it was too big fit in either of the bags I took on the plane, so I crawled through the line of tripods and sat under the rope at the edge of the shore, and propped my camera on my knee. I didn’t want to just watch the launch through the viewfinder, so I focused, used the live view screen to frame it with the launch pad at the very bottom of the frame, and when the time came, just held down the shutter button hoping for the best.
Of course, it didn’t really work, and the angle drifted over and up before there was anything to see, so I got a bunch of pictures of clouds… but then the buffer filled, so I let up for a second, picked it up, and blindly started shooting just holding it against my collar bone… and I got one lucky shot!
It was… insane. Amazing. Seemed so much faster than I expected, especially since the cloud ceiling was so low. The countdown hit zero, the smoke began billowing out, Endeavour started to rise, the rumbling crackling wave of sound hit us, and then zwoop! right up and disappeared into the clouds, making them glow for a moment before punching through, the column of smoke trailing it cast its shadow across the cloud layer, and off to space!
Zoomed/cropped versionThe smoke plumeThe smoke begins to clear
Immediately, like a kid coming off a roller coaster, all I could think was,
“Can we do it again now?”
Once confident the shuttle was out of range and wouldn’t peek-a-boo through the clouds, and the roar subsided, folks meandered back to listen to the radio coverage or watch NASAtv as Endeavour dumped its SRBs, jettisoned the external tank, and completed its 8 minute journey to Low Earth Orbit.
Mr. Pink-tie-and-sneakers says *le sigh*”So, uh, what now?”
The countdown clock was counting up, but most people stuck around for a while, letting the traffic from the crowds watching from the causeway, visitors complex, or other sites clear out first… and perhaps moreso, processing the amazingness we just witnessed.
We talked, tweeted, took a preliminary pass through our pictures, and watched and rewatched everyone’s videos. I, for one, was just kind of stunned. Endeavour broke my brain. In a good way. A very, very good way. It’s disappointing that the clouds cut our view so short, but so so amazing that I got to see it at all. I can’t wait to come back and see STS-135 launch (because clearly, that has to happen now!) but it’s so sad that it will be the last shuttle launch ever. I demand a hundred more launches! But I’m so grateful I got the chance to see one from so close!
Like I said, brain = broken.
(Like how a power surge can fry your computer? The awesome overload of NASAtweetup has fried my brain.)
We hung out a while, chatting about random things, and intermittently spurting incoherent babble involving space shuttles and amazingness, and eventually people began to disperse. By the time I figured the traffic was probably manageable, my uncle’s launch responsibilities were wrapping up, so we met up in the VAB parking lot and I followed him home a back way, and traffic was surprisingly light, even for an alternate route several hours after launch!
The rest of the trip was pretty low key (not that anything could have compared anyway!) We went out for post-launch-lunch… and then a few hours later, my aunt got home from work, and we all went out to dinner. Tuesday, I did wash so I’d have something to wear home, got a bit of work done, and met up with Nina and Chris for dinner, which was lots of fun!
Then Wednesday morning it was off to the airport and home… with a 90 minute layover in Memphis that turned into several hours, because the plane we were supposed to be leaving on got ridiculously delayed at its previous stop. Delta was a class act about it, and handed out $25 vouchers when we finally did leave, but it still made for a nasty-long day. From the time we left my aunt & uncle’s house to when I finally walked through my own door was about 14 hours, for what is normally just under 2 hours in the air on a direct flight. For an extra 4 or 5 hours, I could have driven home and saved $175. >.< Oh well! Travelsuck does not diminish the awe of a shuttle launch, nor the awesome that is NASAtweetup! See you at 135, tweeps! 😀
The bus made its way from the press site parking lot out towards the launch pad, and the tweeps squee with delight when the shuttle comes into view. And then we kept getting closer. And closer! And then there was a fence, so we couldn’t go any closer, but the bus pulled off into a field right outside the fence, with a roped off rectangle designating the RSS viewing area, clearly meant for us.
We filed out of the bus into our pen… and saw this:
*Squee!* And then even better, someone with a functioning brain (aka not me) quickly realized if you back up to the farther side of the field, the change in angle is enough that the fence is no longer in your line of sight! Yay!
The Rotating Service Structure (usually referred to as the RSS) is that grey scaffold-y-looking thinger, and like scaffolding, is how the engineers get at the orbiter to work on it, once it’s on the pad, hence the “Service Structure” part of the name. But the other part of the name is “Rotating” – and that’s what we came to see. 🙂
Initially, the RSS was still in place, obscuring the orbiter (as you can see on the left), but after a few minutes it began to swing out of the way, gradually revealing Endeavour herself! (on the right, and below)
And here we have the space tweeps!:
I wonder, how many thousands of photos were taken in that field, in that hour?
Not all of them were of the shuttle…
Stephanie @Schierholz, our fearless leader 🙂 She makes the tweetupy goodness happen!The fellow in blue is Gary, the very same awesome tour guide from the last trip!
…But most were! And for good reason!
Endeavour with the RSS fully retracted for launch! All ready to fly. 🙂
Eventually, we took a few last shots, said “Bon voyage!” to the pretty spaceship, and loaded back onto the busses. We thought that would be the last we’d see of Endeavour up close, but then as the bus made to leave, its path took us around to the front of the pad area, and stopped!
Through the right-side windows, we had this spectacular view:
We weren’t allowed to get off there, but they did stay put for a few minutes while we opened the windows, crammed over to the one side of the bus, and frantically snapped a zillion more shots of this amazing machine.
We continued on, with Gary pointing out more interesting tidbits (including the crawler that moves the shuttles from the VAB out to the launch pad) along the way, and headed back to the press site, and from there to where we were staying, because though it’s mid-afternoon, for astronauts and space tweeps who have things to do at 3am, it’s bedtime!
This post may make more sense if you read the #NASAtweetup posts first. (Part 1 & Part 2)
So launch was delayed until Monday at the earliest, and the tweeps were all scrambling to see if they could stay. For most folks, it was a matter of seeing if they could get another day or two off work and rearranging flight/hotel reservations to accommodate a few extra days on the space coast to see the launch.
For me, however, there was no question of if I could/would stay to see the launch. There is absolutely no way I’m missing a chance to see the space shuttle launch from this amazingly close! With a portable job and relatives to crash with, I’d stay til Christmas if I had to.
No, the question was, “Hmm… not launching til at least Monday, eh? Well, it’s Friday, and I’d like to be in Philly for Saturday afternoon… that’s enough time to fly home and back, right?”
Yep, you heard me.
Remember what I said about not having a reasonable bone in my body?
See, my dear friend Rachel is having a baby, and her surprise baby shower was Saturday. I wasn’t expecting to be able to be there, once the tweetup date had been moved from mid-April to the end, since the launch was supposed to be Friday afternoon, and with a couple gazillion people there, traffic would be all sorts of impossible getting out of the area afterward… and since we drove down, there literally wouldn’t be enough hours between when we could leave and when the shower would start, even if we drove straight through…
But with the delay, it occurred to me that this trip really hadn’t cost me much, so I had just enough time and money to fly home for the shower and fly back for the launch, and drive home with Daddy as planned.
He, of course, thought I was insane. But when I get an idea in my head, it’s hard to stop me, and I had decided I wanted to go to Rachel’s baby shower!
Surprise!
I found a reasonably-priced flight for Saturday morning that would get me back just in time, and my mom volunteered to pick me up at the airport. It was pretty funny, because I talked to Rachel via email Friday night, so she knew about the delay and that I was still in Florida… then.
So when I turned up in her house the next day, she was pretty surprised! ^_^
It was kind of epic, and just as well that I came home for it, because now it sounds like it’s going to be a little while before the next launch attempt. They’re not setting a new date yet (until they make sure the part they’re replacing fixes the problem, I guess), but not before the 8th, they say, so Dad’s driving home, and once we get a date, we’ll see if he can go back, and if not, I’ll find a flight back! One way or another, I will see Endeavour fly!
Less than twelve hours after arriving back at my aunt and uncle’s from #NASAtweetup Day 1, I headed back for more. The rotating service structure was successfully retracted around midnight, so everything was on target for the scheduled launch at 3:47:55pm. Finding my way there went a good deal more smoothly this time, and when I arrived, the press site was hoppin’!
Our day kicked off with a group picture in front of the countdown clock (I’m in the front row with bright blue sleeves, sitting on the concrete thing), and then headed into the twent for a few more awesome speakers!
STS-119 Astronaut Ricky Arnold came first, telling us a lot about working in space, loving what he does (even when he’s not in space) and who he does it with, the STS-134 crew, and space food (PB&J tortillas being his go-to meal)! He described the constant acceleration of the trip up, “You just keep thinking, ‘Wow, boy, a really can’t go any faster than I’m going now…’ and you continue to go faster than the last time you thought it!” and compared it to the much more gradual and gentle trip down, as you start feeling gravity again, “Things that were long since lost eight days ago on the mission mysteriously start falling from the sky.”
NASA’s Associate Administrator for Education, STS-122 & 129 Astronaut Leland Melvin(@Astro_Flow) was chock full of inspirational lines like, “When you’re given lemons, you make lemonade, and hopefully you have some sugar,” and “If we stop exploring, we’re going to falter as a civilization.” He talked about supporting the space program and military families, play as science/engineering education, Earth’s 37 shades of blue, “family dinner” in space with the shuttle and ISS astronauts, and how he got the name “Astro Flow” (wanting to be like one of the ISS crew who’d been up for a few months, flowing like a fish around the station).
I got to ask him where he’d want to go if he could go back to space. “Probably Mars… if I could, I think to go to another planet, to go past the moon and go somewhere that we haven’t been before. The thing is to build propulsion systems to get us there… Also maybe L1 or L2, where you’re just kind of hanging out, you don’t have to worry about orbiting around anything to get your microgravity, but you’re actually in the ultimate sense of no gravity, because all the forces balance out. But just the experience of looking back at the planet. Every time you get that opportunity, it’s just breathtaking!”
LEGO Designer Daire McCabe (@DaireMcCabe) came up and told us how LEGO and NASA partnered up on education programs, creating new space themed LEGO models and curriculums. They’re sending a few lego sets up on the shuttle to be built in space, including some, like one of the ISS, that can’t support themselves in normal gravity, but will be fine in microgravity. They’re also going to have building races between kids at home and astronauts in space! (Check out LEGOspace.com!) He has pretty much the coolest job ever (besides the astronauts, of course), with his desk covered in piles of LEGO bricks, 6 meters of drawers full of pieces in his office, and a store room with bins and bins of every piece ever. *jealous* Also, he brought a huge thing of the STS-134 mission patch made out of LEGOs!
Lt. Col. Patrick Barrett, USAF 45th Weather Squadron is the man who makes the final call on whether the weather is go for launch! His team monitors the observed and forecast weather for the launch pad, and coordinates with the Spaceflight Meteorology Group out of Houston, which monitors the weather at the TAL sites (Transoceanic Abort Landing sites, the emergency back-up plan if the shuttle launches but can’t get to orbit for some reason). He talked some about how the meteorological technology and knowledge have improved over the years the shuttle’s been launching, some specific tools and models they’ve developed specifically for the shuttle’s requirements and silly Florida weather. Most importantly, he announced that there was a 70% chance of favorable weather for launch!
Lunch happened, and then it was time to wave at astronauts.
Around 12:30, the STS-134 crew would be passing through on their way to the launch pad, so we all made our way down to the rope in a field indicating how close to the road we were allowed to get, and waited for the snazzy silver bullet known as “the AstroVan” to bring them by.
They showed up right on time, and we all waved as they turned in to the Launch Control Center to drop off a few important-type passengers who would be watching the launch from there. It seemed like they sat there for ages, but then they started moving again and came back out to continue on. Except when they came back to the road…
They turned the wrong way!
The AstroVan, along with its armored truck companion and the rest of the caravan all went back the way they had come, and thus, we discovered we’d been scrubbed. (And by “we,” I mean the launch, and by “scrubbed” we mean not happening today, in case you’re not up on your NASA lingo.)
=(
Smartphones were promptly whipped out to see what the internet knew of this new development while the NASA folks amongst us got in touch with people who knew things. We started meandering back to the twent, and I got a picture with Seth Green in front of the VAB!
While we waited to hear what the story was and what sort of delay we were looking at, Stephanie from JPL offered us show and tell as a consolation prize, featuring aerogel! It’s the world’s lightest solid, and completely bizarre!
Aerogel is solid, not gel, but it’s made from gel, sort of like a hardened foam. It’s currently used mostly for insulation, as it’s the lowest density solid, but it’s incredibly light and strong, though if you hit/drop it hard enough it would shatter like glass.
The surface is slightly rough, but it’s so freakishly light, this piece hardly weighed enough for my hand to notice it was there at all… it even looks like it’s floating in my hand… and it was translucent and kind of glowy, so I’m not entirely convinced it wasn’t actually just a hologram. 😀
So basically, it was perfect for entertaining a tent full of disappointed nerds! (She even let us put our names in for a drawing to keep one of the three pieces she brought! Would have been an awesome souvenir!)
Poo on you, APU!
So we eventually were informed that the scrub was because a problem somewhere in second of the three Auxiliary Power Unit‘s cooling systems. They’re not sure exactly what/where, just that it didn’t come on when it was supposed to or something, so they have to run tests before they can fix it, and the testing alone will take at least 48 hours, so no launch until Sunday or later.
But hey, we were witness to the first time the AstroVan ever turned around on the way to the launch pad! So that’s special, right? 😛
Definitely a bummer, but NASA’s priority is rightly the safety of the crew, so if Endeavour isn’t in perfect working order, she’s not going anywhere! It may be a little thing in a redundant system, but it’s better to not launch than to launch and then have something go terribly wrong in space!
Honestly, when you consider all the gazillions of pieces that have to work together exactly right to keep the shuttles flying and the astronauts safe, riding a sort-of-controlled explosion into space, it’s pretty impressive (and a testament to the intelligence, hard work, and dedication of the people working in the shuttle program) that there haven’t been more tragic accidents than there were. As we’ve been reminded…
Having gone to sleep shortly after midnight, a perfectly reasonable bedtime, I woke up at an equally reasonably time, around 7. So of course, without a reasonable bone in my body, I was exhausted. But I was so frakking excited, I didn’t care. I re-loaded our car with my computer, various cameras and accessories, snacks, and yarn-infested monsterpurse – basically everything I brought(/own) except the extra clothes – grabbed the email printouts telling us where to go, armed the GPS, and set out.
The GPS, it turns out, is not particularly helpful.
I mean, it got me onto the right road, but considering the route was basically, “You know that bridge you can see from the end of the driveway? Get on it, then turn left on 3,” I’m pretty sure a blind senile chipmunk could have gotten me there too. As far as I could tell, it was suggesting registration was happening somewhere in an unbroken half mile of chainlink and trees, so I turned into the first opening I saw. There was a gate, but it was open. It didn’t look particularly promising, but I didn’t really know what I was looking for either.
About a half mile down that road, I was reasonably convinced this was both not where I was supposed to be, and somewhere I was not supposed to be, so I turned around, went a little farther down the main road but it wasn’t there either, so backtracked a ways, and finally found it. I pulled in and sat it the car a moment longer, recollecting my composure, sanity, and acceptable forms of identification before going to check in.
Once I did that, and took a brief moment to completely geek out at the sight of my credentials and very classy swag bag, since I no longer trusted my GPS/directions/self, I asked the kind folks behind the table to direct me to my next stop. “Go right on this road, check in with the guard at the gate, and turn right at the VAB.”
That kind of melted my brain a little bit, but I did as I was told, and after a stretch could see the VAB, tiny on the horizon, but towering over the trees and everything else. It was rather surreal, looming ahead of me for miles, slowly growing larger in my field of view, while never really seeming to get was any closer… until there it was – I was there – it was RIGHT. THERE. in front of me. In all its hugenormous glory. And thankfully, between the grey behemoth and my car, there was a wonderfully obvious road, leading only to the right.
Oh. Turn right at the VAB. So I did. And signs and guards and folks waving things led me, in short order, to a suitable grassy parking space. Adjacent to the field I was in, there was an amusingly almost-empty parking lot, with just a line of news trucks/RVs, and a few lanes roped off for what turned out to be bus loading zones. Beyond that was a path through another field, past the countdown clock, and alas, the tent in which the tweet-up would be held – dubbed, by Twitter convention, the “twent”. I made it! (And on time, even!) The outside of the twentInside the twent
SpaceTweeps, ASSEMBLE!
I grabbed an unclaimed slice of table and settled in. After a quick welcome, they started off by having us go around the twent to introduce ourselves. You would think (or I did, at any rate) that 150 introductions would take for-freakin-ever, and get boring a mere fraction of the way through, but it turns out that the tweeps (twitter people) are excellent at keeping it short and sweet (#duh), and this is an incredibly interesting and diverse group of people!
We’ve got NASA and the ESA and Twitter represented, engineers, tech and web folk, writers, photographers, designers, medical professionals, educators, students, stuffed animals, a ventriloquist, a Jeopardy champ, and even a few stray celebrities roaming about! People from every walk of life and all over the country and world, even, sharing only a tendency towards geekiness, an interest in space exploration, and the notion that community can be built 140 characters at a time.
After that succinct-yet-impressive round of introductions, I had the feeling that we could have been left to entertain ourselves for two days and still had a blast just getting to know each other… and then the official program started!
First up were Mallory and Heather, who told us all about the current spacesuit that shuttle crews wear for their EVAs, as well as the next generation they’re working on now. Yes, these two are not only lovely presenters, but also engineers, part of the team developing a new spacesuit! The next phase, they say, will be to condense the various systems racks-worth of equipment into a backpack smaller and lighter than the current one!
Next, we took a break for lunch, and I opted to join the crowd trekking over to investigate the cafeteria. I grabbed a cheeseburger and some apple juice, looked around at the folks who work and eat there every day, and laughed at the thought of “getting used to it”… not having little spaz attacks every time you saw the shuttle or the VAB, or thought about the fact that your job is sending things and people into space. I mean, I guess you’d have to, to some extent, or your brain would break, but I struggle to imagine ever being able to concentrate enough to get things done (especially such critical and precise work)!
It’s a fairly substantial walk between the press site and the twent. Not long, really, but long enough that it felt long in the Florida heat and humidity, with the sun beating down on you, and the path not being entirely sidewalk’d. As my brain tends to do, it meandered back to other times when I was plodding along the side of a road in weather that felt like you jumped in a pot of soup… and in each of the instances the brain recalled, they were the start of some really epic adventure. (Well, in one instance the walk was the epic adventure… I’ll have to tell that story sometime. But not now.) Anyways, they don’t naturally go hand-in-hand, so I thought it was a noteworthy and amusing pattern, and said so to whoever was walking near me at the time… they just kinda looked at me funny.
“What happens in space stays in space… unless it’s peer reviewed!”
…or shared at a tweetup!
Waleed AbdalatiDana HutchersonTara Ruttley@Astro_Clay Anderson
Post-nommage, the televised portion of the tweetup began. It was a whirlwind of awesomeness, with rapidfire presentations from (in order of appearance):
NASA Chief Scientist Waleed Abdalati Talked about how the space program is part of America’s soul, and how we as tweet-up-ers are part of it, and we’re all making history. As the last shuttles launch, it’s a period of transition, “It’s not really just an end – it’s a very, very exciting beginning.” When asked what he has to say to highschool students, he said, “There is a brilliant future that’s theirs (and ours) for the creating.” On international collaboration, “Collectively, we can do far more than we can as individuals.” And my favorite, what asked what current science/projects get him really excited, waking up in the morning saying “I wonder what the propulsion guys are going to report today?!” he responded, “Don’t we all wake up saying that?”
Endeavour Flow Director Dana Hutcherson described what NASA’s three shuttle flow directors (all 3 are women) do, coordinating the three components – orbiter, external tank (which for this mission is the rather unique ET-122), and solid rocket boosters) – of their respective shuttles through the whole process from the previous landing, processing, to the pad, and finally launch! “The canned answer that we’re supposed to say is ‘All the vehicles are approximately the same,’ but it’s really the teams that are different and unique… As part of the Endeavour family, we like to think that Endeavour’s the best.”
ISS Associate Program Scientist Tara Ruttley (@ISS_research) gave us a top ten of coolest things to know about space station research, including that over 1100 investigations have been completed on the ISS in the last 10 years – which was it’s assembly period – as in, this sucker’s still being built, but we managed to squeeze in some research, experiments going up on STS-134 (among them, the Alpha-Magnetic Spectrometer, space spiders, and something about plasma detectors!), some of the technologies and scientific discoveries that have resulted from previous experiments, and the fabulous quote, “What happens in space stays in space… unless it’s peer reviewed.”
Expedition 15/STS-131 Astronaut Clayton Anderson (@Astro_Clay) is quite the personality. He told us how he got to be an astronaut (after applying 15 times), some about life in space, some very… specific details about how he felt after coming back to earth. He described the experience of “falling out gracefully” into space for spacewalks (thinking “I was born to be right here, doing this.”), and not trying to communicate telepathically with aliens (“I mean, you can do that through tweeting!). His dream is to see “an American vehicle, with a United States flag on the side, that’s carrying United States’ astronauts into orbit….[Who?] I don’t know. I don’t care. Whoever. May the best person win. But do it so it’s safe, do it so it’s reliable, do it so we can get Americans back into space.” Another point on which he and I agree: “the greatest thing is” when you nod off while reading in space, you don’t jolt back awake as your head drops, “because there’s no gravity, so you just kind of float there, and everything on your body relaxes, and you let go of the book… if you wake back up, the book’s still there!”
AMS Project Manager Trent Martin (@AMSISS) filled in for Professor Sam Ting who was supposed to come, telling us all about the Alpha-Magnetic Spectrometer, which the STS-134 crew will be installing on the ISS, to look for antimatter, dark matter, and dark energy, measuring particle hits in much higher quantities than it could on earth, where the atmosphere filters most of them out, so the scientists will have a crazy-ton more data to work from, to basically tell us if… well, physics is right or not. And answer the big questions we just don’t know. Cool!
…and the Question Of The Day Award goes to, “I’m just wondering how long you spent planning and designing the AMS unit so that you don’t Hubble it?”
You know you’ve got a bus full of geeks when you pass out security badges …and everyone starts taking pictures of them.
Next up was the grand tour.
We loaded onto buses, and our tour guide gave us each one of these →
You know, ’cause the credentials we already had to apply and get background checked for to get in the gate wasn’t enough. 🙂
We knew where we were heading now, but it still felt rather surreal when the bus not only stopped right next to the VAB, but let us get off! Of course, that was nothing compared to walking inside.
The size of this place is absolutely astounding. It’s 525 feet high, and the fourth largest building in the world by volume. The funny part is, it’s technically a 1-story building! (The largest 1-story building in the world, to be precise!) Some other impressive numbers and facts can be found here.
The picture right is a feeble attempt to capture the scale of the interior. (The size of the people at the bottom of the frame should give you some idea!)
The one below is looking straight up to the ceiling… and still doesn’t do it justice. Apparently, sometimes clouds actually form up there – inside the building.
We wandered around a while, taking pictures and just being sort of stunned. It was surprisingly quiet in there, considering how many of us were milling about. Everyone just kept their voices down, as if out of reverence. The sense of history here overwhelmed even its sheer hugenormousness. For more than 40 years, spaceships have been built here! It was the same feeling I got visiting the great historic cathedrals in Europe – awe.
Our insanely awesome tour guide, Gary, (a former NASA engineer, who retired but loved it too much to all-the-way leave) pointed out a big orange roundish thing behind a bunch of access structure (below left) – ET-138, the external tank for the next, and very last space shuttle. It’s hard to see in this picture, but the solid rocket boosters are attached on either side too! All they need is their lovely orbiter, Atlantis!
Eventually, it was time to head on to the next stop on our tour. As we walked out, somebody asked Gary about the big red bracket-things (pictured above right). He informed us, rather nonchalantly, that they were used to put together the Saturn V rockets (you know, the ones that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon). o.0
The rest of the tour included a brief stop to look at one of the Shuttle Training Aircraft and the Mate-Demate Device (used to attach/detach shuttle orbiters and the specially fitted airplanes that carry them across the country if they have to land at Edwards AFB), and the Apollo/Saturn V center. I didn’t take pictures there, because my batteries were all running low by that point, and it’s a stop on the regular Visitors Complex tour, so I was just there on vacation a year ago, and took pictures then… of course, I now realize I have no idea where those pictures are, but hopefully they’ll turn up!
Finally, we headed back to regroup and hang out in the twent until it was time to head out to watch the RSS retraction! While we waited, I got my picture taken with LeVar Burton (@levarburton)! I tried to refrain from being too much of a fangirl. Judging from my failure to speak coherently, I’m pretty sure I failed and looked like a big dork, but I guess he’s probably used to that!
Shortly before it was supposed to be time to head back out, the weather revealed it had other plans. In typical Florida style, a storm rolled in out of nowhere, stalling the RSS retraction, and chasing us from the twent into a building with actual walls. We congregated in the press auditorium and just sort of goofed around and got to know our fellow tweeps a little better.
The storm hung around just a little too long, pushing the earliest chance for the retraction to later than our lovely volunteer tour guides and bus drivers could be expected to stay, so we couldn’t either. So we didn’t get to get up close and personal with Endeavour, but hopefully the service structure will get pulled back sometime tonight, so everything stays on schedule and tomorrow we can see her fly!
Well, as you may have guessed, from the proximity of my location in the last post to my destination, and there has been no report of my tragic death by car crash/explosion/alligator (pretty much the only thing that could have stopped me), I did make it to the NASA tweetup at Kennedy Space Center. Having left home (Philly-ish) just a little after 4am, we were safely around DC, into Virginia, and heading away from the traffic by the time rush hour hit, so we made really good time. It was roughly 1000 miles of this: but I didn’t particularly mind, as it’s pretty, I’ve always liked roadtrips, and Daddy’s good company. 🙂
We made a slight detour to stop in Charleston, South Carolina, to meet up with a tug from my Dad’s company that was docked there, so he could get some of their paperwork and safety training updated. It was a nice little break from the car, and the crew was incredibly nice and hospitable.
I had half expected to spend that stop sitting in the car waiting for Dad to finish what he needed to do, so it was a very pleasant surprise to instead spend it in their cozy air-conditioned galley, chatting with a very silly and entertaining bunch of guys, full of rough-and-tumble charm (with varying degrees of “rough-and-tumble”), who I would happily hang out with again, with or without the pretense of Dad’s work. I was honestly disappointed when we had to get back on the road, but we wanted to get to my aunt/uncle’s before it got too late.
With about 2 hours there, and a few shorter stops throughout the trip for fuel (caffeine and gasoline) and potty breaks, we still made the whole trip in about 18 hours, arriving in Cocoa a little after 10pm.
![[Very] Frozen sock!](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7132/7607819334_bc2c589626.jpg)
