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!
On the Monday the 9th, they announced the new launch date would be Monday the 16th, around 3 in the afternoon. Daddy said he had to help the sistercreature move home from school right around then, so wouldn’t be able to go. (Somebody got their priorities on wrong! 😛 )
I still wanted to drive back down so I’d be able to get around without begging my aunt/uncle or the tweeps for rides, but the parents were none too keen on me roadtripping with other tweeps, (even though I had been talking to them for ages, spent a few days with them in person now, and everyone had to pass a Federal Government background check to get into the tweetup!) and even less amenable to me driving alone, and no friends from home were available for a random vacation that week, so I talked my aunt into letting me borrow their extra minivan once I got down there, and started scrounging for cheap flights.
The plan was to fly down either Sunday evening (or super early Monday morning if it was significantly cheaper), since I’d been co-planning a “baby party” for Rachel and Elliott, to be held Sunday right after church, so wanted to stick around for that. (You’re not hallucinating, the last post did say I rushed home from the first one for Rachel’s baby shower, and now I’m talking about another one… sort of. That was a small family-and-close-friends sort of shower, this one was a bigger church-wide celebration for almostMama AND futureDad.)
This is the invitation I drew (pretty adorable, if I do say so myself!), which we snuck into church bulletins on a Sunday we knew they wouldn’t be there:
Conflict! D=
Then, we tweeps were informed that we might be able to have another shot at seeing the RSS retraction (well, re-retraction!)… which was scheduled for noonish the day before launch – AKA, exactly when the party was happening! The real trick was “might”. Being there for RSS retraction and getting to be that close to a shuttle on the launch pad would be an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, if it turned out we could, especially since there will literally only be one other space shuttle on a launch pad ever again… but did I want to miss a party I helped plan for my best friends for a maybe? A long-shot, even? Dilemma! (And we didn’t even know when we would find out if we could go, to at least decide if I could wait to find out before finalizing plans!)
The more I thought about it, the more I was leaning towards taking the chance that the maybe would pan out, skipping out on the party to get to Florida in time to make the RSS retraction if we were allowed to go. I mean, logically, seeing RSS retraction up close and unobstructed would be a literal once in a lifetime opportunity, while baby showers are clearly not, and in this case, not even limited to once for this baby! And I did technically fly a thousand miles to make it to that one…
Besides, Rachel is almost as excited about all my crazy NASAtweetup adventures as I am!
BABY SHOWER vs. SPACESHIP
Ultimately, no matter how awesome the friends and anti-cheese the shower, that right there should have made it a no-brainer. But, after all, I am the master of making simple decisions way more epic and convoluted than they have any right to be… and then the maybe did solidify into a yes, I saw a picture from a previous tweet-up of how close we would actually be, and I was sold. I found a super cheap flight on Spirit airlines for early Sunday morning, arranged a ride straight from the airport to Kennedy, and told my fellow party planners I wasn’t actually going to be present at said party.
Meanwhile, it occurred to me that I was going to get a new camera. Not so much a decision as a realization – I’d wanted a nice digital SLR for a couple years, but my inner cheapskate would always slap me upside the head, point at the price tag, point at my bank account, and laugh. “Someday…” I’d think, wistfully. And then, an epiphany of sorts:
If you are EVER going to spend THAT much money on a camera,
it BETTER happen in time to take some pictures of that frakking space shuttle.
Instinct had always said wait until I was a “grown up” with an income I could actually survive off of outside my parents house… but honestly, the value of a camera is not in the camera, it’s in the pictures. What makes it worth the money is how you use it, and I did want to get a nice camera eventually, so in a sense, I would be being a bad steward of the hypothetical future camera if I missed my chance to photograph one of the last space shuttle launches and a ton of other cool stuff, just because I waited too long to buy the camera.
I thought about going with one of those in-between sort of cameras, with a decent optical zoom and more manual functions than a point-and-shoot, but without interchangeable lenses, but then my mom agreed to chip in a couple hundred bucks as my slightly-early birthday present, so entry-level legit dSLRs were a bit more doable. So I perused the interwebs a bit, asked twitterfolk for their opinions, and ran around to every store I thought might have a decent camera trying to figure out which to get. It would have been nice to get another Canon, so I could use the lenses on my film camera too, but I was ultimately wooed by the Nikon D3100 (plus 55-200mm lens for some nice zoom), which seemed like a better camera than the Canons in the same range – and then was on sale at Best Buy for a hundred dollars less than that!
And then there was panic.
Spirit Airlines is cheap, in every sense of the word. The ticket price is very reasonable, comparatively, but/because they charge you extra for everything other than getting your arse from Point A to Point B. For a hopefully 2 day trip, with access to a washer dryer if needed, I didn’t need a lot of stuff, and Spirit wanted at least $28 for even a carry-on, so I figured I’d try to avoid that, and just cram everything in my purse, but I needed to clarify that I could have both my rather large purse and camera bag without paying anything. Spirit’s website was not helpful, so I tried calling them, which was less helpful. (Automated menu was broken, no matter which button you pushed, when you finally got a human, it seemed to be the same guy who barely spoke English and couldn’t understand my question!)
So I turned to the rest of the internet… which just made it worse. Not only could I not find an answer to my question, I could not find a single positive review of Spirit Airlines. Besides complaints about nickel-and-dimeing, which I was okay with because the total still ended up cheaper than any other ticket, last minute anyway, there were horror stories about planes getting delayed for days because of weather or mechanical problems and Spirit refusing to put passengers on alternate flights or refund/compensate or do anything to help, cabins being horrendously dirty, seats being even more crammed and uncomfortable than usual, and the staff being generally unpleasant.
Also, in the midst of this, I discovered I didn’t know where my drivers license was, which I’d need both to get on the plane at all, and to get into KSC. Spent the better part of the day before I’d leave looking for it, getting yelled at for not having it with me at all times (it’s not like I need to see it regularly, so I just hadn’t noticed it wasn’t in my bag), trying to pack, and generally freaking out. Eventually my dad found it under a seat in my car, where I had looked, but apparently not well enough.
Getting there: AKA, more panic.
The flight was to leave at 6am, from the Atlantic City airport, so I figured we should leave around 3am to have time to get there and get through the airport… and since I rarely get to sleep before then, just didn’t plan to. That evening, I went over to church to help set up for the baby party I wouldn’t be at, and then came home to finish packing (and conceded to maybe having to pay for a carry-on backpack, if they wouldn’t count that as the personal item in addition to purse and camera bag… the rules were really confusing!)
I knew I had told my dad when and where I had to leave from, so when I went to wake him up and he said we didn’t have to leave for an hour yet, I figured he knew what he was talking about… but when we were getting in the car close to 4:30 and I asked him if he knew how to get there or needed the GPS, and he looked at me like I was a moron, I realized he thought I meant Philly, and had forgotten the flight was from AC, and I had been right with my original time estimate, so now it was going to be a miracle if we got there before the plane left at all.
Thankfully, traffic at that hour is pretty non-existant, the airport was slightly closer than Dad thought (he was thinking of a different one another side of the city, apparently), and I was able to call the airport itself, who had no way of getting in touch with the Spirit people at the gate (???) but did assure me our ETA would leave me enough time to get through security and to the plane in time, which I did. *phew*
Spirit’s lines were confusing as crap, and the lady directing traffic was bitchy and condescending about it, but I had ditched even more of my stuff in the car so I could get through faster, so with just the purse full of clothes and camera bag, I got through security pretty quickly, and ran frantically through the airport, only to discover there was still a frakking line at the gate! >.<
The plane wasn’t nice, by any stretch, but it wasn’t disgusting or noticeably more uncomfortable than other coach seats, and did manage to leave on time and arrive in Orlando in one piece and on schedule. My ride’s flight was not, and rental car confusion added further delays, so I had a nice long while to sit in the parking garage waiting to leave, but we still made it to KSC and the press site a few minutes before we needed to be on the bus to the launch pad!
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.
This is a re-post of one I wrote on the 134tweetup group blog. The original is here.
Endeavour! Image credit: NASA.gov
In less than 90 hours,
(assuming the weather holds…)
we get to see this beauty →
fly.
Think about that for a minute. Take a moment to contemplate how awesome it is that this gorgeous machine, with its six occupants, will soon ride a “controlled” explosion out of our atmosphere, while we watch, close enough to feel the sound of liftoff, to go meet another amazing bit of technology and its occupants in orbit and do science.
We, collectively, as humanity, are pretty darn impressive sometimes. We, individually, as tweetup participants, are all sorts of fortunate to have this opportunity.
[And then, as this was my first post on 134tweetup.com, I introduced myself.
But this is my own little corner of the blogosphere, so that would be silly.]
I’ve grown up with the shuttle program. Well, it’s got a few years on me, so it’s kind of like I’m the awkward, not-nearly-as-cool kid sister watching the shuttle doing its awesome “big kid” stuff from my stroller… wait, that actually happened. I have family in Cocoa, FL, close enough to have a pretty decent view (even from itty-bitty height) the couple of times when there happened to be a launch scheduled while we were visiting.
I was always a space geek… the kid in the home-made spacesuit that my mom sewed from one of those silver thermal blankets with a plastic pretzel tub over my head. 🙂 I remained a space geek, and a geek in general. The one who dragged Dad to the Space Center on the days of vacation when the rest of the family went to the beach.
Rocket Garden at KSCVCDiscovery on the pad, through binocularsThe VAB through a tour bus window
Somewhere along the way I discovered Twitter, and promptly followed @NASA.
In 2009, NASA started hosting “Tweetups” (twitter + meet-up = tweetup, in case you missed that). That summer, the first one at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC was held, with the recently returned crew of Space Shuttle Atlantis mission STS-125… and it just so happened to be on my birthday. Figuring it was destiny or somesuch, I signed up, and more-or-less informed my dad that we were going to DC for my birthday, to meet astronauts.
He was a little confused at that, but once I explained, he agreed. He’s been following the shuttle program since its beginning, and NASA’s various missions since he was pint-sized, so he was equally excited. So we spent my 21st birthday roaming the Air & Space Museum, hearing all about STS-125’s adventures in space with the Hubble, and meeting some cool “tweeps”, astronauts, and the occasional astronaut tweep. (See below left.)
@Astro_Mike! (Mike Massimino) & @ohlauren (me)with Andrew Feustel (also on STS-134) & Mike Good!
When @NASAtweetup announced there would be a tweetup at KSC for the STS-134 launch, I didn’t really figure on going… I mean, Pennsylvania and Florida aren’t exactly neighbors, and I’m not exactly rolling in money… but I thought, “What the heck, I probably won’t get in anyway,” and registered just in case. Then I got an email that started with “Congratulations”… o.O
And suddenly, it all became clear. I have family to stay within the area. My job is portable. I have just enough gas money and don’t mind long drives. I have a chance not just to see a space shuttle launch, but to see the second-to-last NASA shuttle launch probably ever, from as close as anyone not somehow involved in the mission is ever going to get. (Not to mention all the other assorted tweetup awesomeness.) So with that realization, and a blinding flash of whimsy, I sent in my confirmation and started making plans.
When I told my dad, he informed me he was coming along. We called the relatives to give them a heads up on impending visitors, and got him a ticket to another launch viewing site. Heck, we’re still sorting out the details for getting home, but we’re going. Driving, of course, like the crazy people we are, leaving in the awkward hours of Wednesday morning that are still basically Tuesday night and driving straight through. The way things are looking, I’ll spend more time in the car than in Florida, but I don’t care!
Tweetup participants check in at KSC in less than 60 hours.
Vaguely dystopian sci-fi with suspense and an intriguing plot. The setting was indeterminate, regarding time (I’d guess some point in the future, but no telling how far) and place (a city, probably American if it’s a nearish sort of future but could have been elsewhere, even another planet, we don’t know). The main characters had epic adventures and a believable, non-nauseating romance. The dialog was articulate and witty, snarky and heartfelt at all the right moments. It was so good, that when it ended, coming back to reality actually kind of hurt. I still wanted to know what happened next, or at least go back and watch it again.
But no dice– it was a dream.
It played like a movie. A really frakking awesome movie, that was bound to be a genre favorite, maybe even a “blockbuster”. I wish I remembered it well enough to actually make that movie, or perhaps write it out as a book, but like anything I’ve only watched once, I can only recall the basic gist (and I do mean basic), a line or two, and few “snapshot” images. You’d think, being that the writer, director, “cameraman”, and heck, all of the cast/characters, were, in fact, my brain, I’d be able to remember a little better what happened, or at least re-create something similar. But no.
That lovely film was created by my subconscious, who is apparently much more intelligent, creative, and accomplished than my conscious mind, and absolutely refuses to share its brilliance with its conscious counterpart, who could in turn share it with the world…
…’cause my subconscious is a bitch about intellectual property rights.
Mom likes to talk at me when I’m trying to work. A month or two ago, she was asking if I wanted to go see Mary Poppins in Philly with her and Daddy.
At that moment, I really didn’t care much either way, because I:
was trying to work.
am mostly indifferent to the alleged allure of Broadway/Philly-wanting-to-be-Broadway shows. I like plays and musicals well enough, but I just don’t get that excited to see a story I already know acted out, unless I know some of the cast.
don’t plan that far in advance if at all avoidable.
But they need to get out more, and I like to encourage them when they’re willing to go into the city for fun (they both work within the city limits, but seem to have an aversion to going downtown otherwise, which they like to deny/blame on each other) so I said, “Sure, why not?”
I figured for the price of the tickets, it must be a nice venue, worthy of dressing up a bit, probably digging the dress slacks out of the closet. But yesterday, mom feels compelled to point that out.
“No jeans or sweatpants.”
Of course, I took that as a challenge.
The show was tonight, and I babysat earlier this afternoon, so I was wearing sweatpants, and if you add my extreme fondness for this pair of sweatpants to yesterday’s “just because you’re 22 doesn’t mean I trust you to dress yourself” comment, there was no way I was taking off these sweatpants.
However, contrary to my mother’s opinion, I do know how to dress properly, and do know better than to go into a nice theatre looking my usual around-the-house hobo self.
Paradox resolution: the grey skirt.
The grey skirt is long. Floor-skimming long, and heavy enough that it drapes nicely even over a not-nicely-draping extra layer. And it’s shiney-ish and pretty– perfectly respectable evening-out-wear, paired with the black tank I was already wearing, a nice black cardigan, and cute black heels. Also, perfect sweatpants camouflage. o/
The show was pretty good too, by the way. 🙂 (And there were totally people wearing jeans.)
I got through security pretty quickly, and ran frantically through the airport, only to discover there was still a frakking line at the gate! >.<
