Tag: sleep or lack thereof

  • MarsRoadtrip Part 3: More Driving

    The GPS once again proves itself retarded.

    As I was leaving the restaurant, I remembered I needed to get gas, so I poked the “Gas Station” button on the GPS and followed its lead… but the place it took me was not a gas station… looked more like an airport rental car place, so it probably did have gasoline, just not any to share with me.

    So I tried again… and this one didn’t even vaguely resemble a gas station!

    No longer trusting the gorram gizmo, I looked at the map of all the places it was claiming were gas stations, and saw that two of them were on the same road. I figured at least one of them had to actually be for real, so headed that direction. I arrived at the first one, and lo and behold, an actual-factual gas station! Slightly shifty and deserted-looking, but a gas station nonetheless, so I pull in and go to get some gas… but there isn’t any. The pumps were on and functioning, there just wasn’t anything to pump. -_-

    So I got back in and continued on to the next place, which finally actually had gasoline for my sad little car. Filled up, got back in, punched in my uncle’s address, and headed out.

    Of course, instead of taking me back to where I’d gotten off the highway near Glenn, it took me further into Cleveland (pretty much the opposite direction of where I really wanted to go, only I didn’t realize that for a while) and I never quite figured out what it had in mind, because when it got me back near anything resembling a highway, half the turns it wanted me to make were blocked off for construction!

    Eventually, no thanks to the GPS, I found my way to a road pointed in the general direction of my uncle’s and found my way back. Oy!

    [Insert sleep here.]

    To Canada!

    The following morning, I loaded up and headed off again, Canada-bound! About 11 hours on the road… not much to report! I-90 is long. (And boring. Thank goodness for audiobooks! (Or really, just the one since it turned out to be really long!)) Followed it along Lake Erie for the rest of Ohio, through the weird little nub of Pennsylvania, and into New York. I thought about detouring to Niagara Falls, but decided it was gonna be a long enough day already without a 2 hour side trip, so just kept on I-90 over to Syracuse, and then 81 up to Canada!

    For some reason, they let me in 🙂 so I kept going! It was kind of wacky to see everything marked in kilometers and kph… luckily they also included miles for the first while for us silly southerners. Soon every sign in sight was in French, and it really started to feel like I was in another country! (Which is kind of hilarious, because in the grand scheme of Canada, I was barely over the border!)

    By the time I was driving through Montreal on the “Autoroute Transcanadienne” it was dark, and the moon was hanging low and huge and gorgeous, right in front of my face, honestly the biggest and deepest colored I’ve ever seen it… it kind of felt more like another planet than another country!

    At long last, I made it to my hotel, (assured the girl at the desk I had not, in fact, cancelled my reservation,) got to my room, showered, and crashed! Nice room, comfy bed, epic sleep.

    I didn’t have to arrive at the Canadian Space Agency for the first installment of the CSA tweetup and Curiosity’s landing until midnight Sunday night/Monday morning, so I slept in Sunday and it was delicious.

    I thought about going into Montreal to explore/sightsee, but couldn’t figure out what I wanted to see, and figured with my luck with the GPS lately, I’d spend most of the day lost, and I was still pretty beat, so I just hung out at the hotel for the day, watching the only thing on TV that wasn’t the Olympics or in French (or the Olympics in French) – which turned out to be “Say Yes to the Dress” and then “Toddlers in Tiaras”… so, not terribly interesting, but addictive in a train-wreck sort of way – and tweeting and reading and generally relaxing!

  • MarsRoadtrip Part 2: NASA Social

    I made it to my uncle’s house in Akron without incident. My spine was definitely sick of that car seat by the time I got there, but it was not a bad drive! It did, however, seem like the entirety of both the PA and Ohio turnpikes were marked as construction zones, with only 2 patches actually undergoing any construction… o_0 So I was happy to get there, go out for a late-ish dinner (Mexican!) with my aunt and uncle and cousins and then head for bed before too long. Of course, we all know you can’t get proper sleep the night before a tweetup/social, but being horizontal and reading until I eventually dozed off for a couple hours sufficed! Then there were alarm clocks, coffee, and sunlight (in that order) and I was off to Cleveland!

    NASA Social @ Glenn Research Center

    A slightly frantic arrival, in typical “me” fashion, because (though I left on time) I didn’t see the meeting point, and took a little detour through GRC’s parking lot before finding my way across the highway to actual registration, but I made it just in the nick of time! On the bus heading to the briefing center (back across the road where I’d just been!), I discovered that @KelleyApril was also present, by way of a tweet saying she’d seen me arrive! (Funny thing, being sufficiently busy between work and planning a fairly last-minute tweetup/Social trip that I missed most of the Twitter/Facebook chatter about who was going to be at which Socials, so neither of us knew that the other’d be there!)

    Anyways!

    GRC’s Center Director, Ray Lugo, welcomed us with a couple of fun facts I didn’t know about Curiosity, including:

    • Before coming to Glenn, he had worked as the Launch Services Program Director at KSC, and was actually the person who selected the Atlas V rocket as the launch vehicle for Curiosity! That seems to have worked out pretty well. 🙂
    • The rover was named by a then-6th-grader from Kansas, Clara Ma, who submitted the winning contest entry – Curiosity!

    (He got to head out to JPL for the landing… “Perks of being Center Director!”)

    Then we got a brief hello from STS-134 astronaut Greg Johnson, also known as @Astro_Box! I was hoping he’d stick around for a while so I could say hi and maybe get a picture with him, since I got to watch his launch from so delightfully close! But when he asked if anybody had any questions, I couldn’t think of an actual question (my brain was slightly overloaded with excitement!) …and apparently nobody else could either! Unfortunately, by the time I realized it was now or never, he had surmised nobody had any questions, and had another event to get to, so I never got the chance to properly meet him! 🙁 It was still very cool that he took the time to stop by though! (and take/tweet a quick picture!)

    We had a few minutes to mingle and check out some of the exhibits in the lobby, and then we were off on a whirlwind tour of Glenn Research Center! – which is painfully punny, since my group’s first stop was at the 10×10 Supersonic Wind Tunnel (which just means the test section is 10ft high and 10ft wide, and uses compressors and the shape of the tunnel rather than just big fans to get the air flowing faster)! It was cool to see another wind tunnel after visiting Langley Research Center in the fall, where we saw their transonic wind tunnel, which operates right around the speed of sound – whereas this supersonic one typically runs at 2-3 times the speed of sound – and that one was cryogenic (they could cool the air for more accurate testing on small-scale models), while here they can heat the air to test how air flows in jet engines or during atmospheric entry! (As they did for one of the initial parachute deployment tests for Curiosity!) 😀

    The coolest part was we got to go inside the test section, since it wasn’t in use at the moment. It was all very, very, smooth metal, because any little glitch in the surface would create a sonic line or somesuch and throw off the results! Also very nifty: they can change the contour of the walls leading into the test section, with a serious of giant hydraulic jacks that could actually move the 1.5inch thick stainless steel walls in or out by several feet, with a ridiculous degree of accuracy! So neat!

    Next we were off to a Physical Sensors Instrumentation Research lab, where they are working on developing more heat-tolerant sensors to for detecting pressure, light, certain chemicals, or whatever else in jet engine tests and other high-temperature environments. Normal sensors use silicon-based chips, but apparently silicon can only withstand temperatures up to 200 or 250 degrees, and the inside of a jet engine goes upwards of 700 degrees, so that’s not going to cut it! To solve that problem, they’re working on using Silicon Carbide instead, which allows the sensors to keep functioning at much higher temperatures. The process requires certain bits of something to be exposed to UV light and not others (something about polymers that went over my head!), so there are all these storage containers and windows covered in those orange UV filters… and they’re made with microscopic precision, so everything’s done in clean rooms wearing bunny suits!

    Then we saw the Stirling Research Lab‘s “Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator” – a power system they’ve developed to provide electricity for future deep space missions, rovers, and satellites! Curiosity runs on a similar nuclear power system, but this one will be much more efficient. (It’s advanced after all! 😛 But seriously.) It’s powered by a little bit of plutonium-238 (which, we are assured, is much more stable than the plutonioum-239 used in nuclear bombs!) producing a lot of heat energy, that the Advanced Stirling Converter converts into usable electricity, with four times the efficiency of current systems. It’s designed to provide power for 17 years, and the test model we saw in the lab has been running nearly continuously for 4 years already.

    There are three proposed missions NASA is currently considering for development, and two of them would use this power system (a “Comet Hopper” and a… well, basically a boat, that would land on one of the methane seas of Titan to study the “water cycle”-like methane weather patterns!) so they’re obviously hoping one of those two gets selected (the other is a Mars lander that would be solar powered) and now, so am I! 🙂
    (UPDATE: The selection has since been made, and they went with the Mars lander. Still awesome, just not as cool as sending a boat to a moon! 😛 )

    The last stop on our tour was to the SLOPE (Simulated Lunar OPErations) Facility – a giant sandbox! It’s full of special sand designed to resemble the surface of the moon (but without the very fine particles that would create epic dust clouds every time anything moved) or Mars to test the traction/behavior of different tire designs and rovers! Awesomes.

    Their goal when the facility was built was to pick up where Apollo folks had left off… they wanted to test the moon buggy tires and go from there, but obviously the ones actually used are still on the moon, and the rest are all sitting in museums somewhere… but they managed to get in touch with one of the guys who designed the tires, and he “just happened to have a spare sitting in his closet at home.” With his help, partnering with Goodyear, they managed to replicate the original design and manufacture 12 new ones, which they did use for research and as a starting point for new designs!

    We got to see/poke/squish/roll a bunch of the designs they’ve been testing, and he drove the prototype rover that was in there around for us! It was really neat… each of the four wheels is on a sort of arm thing, and has its own motor, so they can both drive and position each independently, which makes for some neat tricks! (Including “inchworming” up hills, tilting the rover in relation to the ground incline to keep it level and improve stability, and all sorts of fancy “getting un-stuck” maneuvers!) And I got to pick up a handful of fake moon sand! 😀

    That concluded the tour, and the bus took us over to the cafeteria/employee center for lunch and gift shop time! I had a pretty tasty cheeseburger and fries (which I think is becoming a tradition, since that’s what I ate at Langley, and I’m pretty sure also at KSC during 134), and a lovely chat with a fellow spacetweep who’s a police officer in Wisconsin! That’s one of the things I love about tweetups/socials – hanging out with people with whom you’d probably never even chance to cross paths, much less sit down and have an actual conversation, otherwise!

    After lunch, we headed back to the briefing center where we’d started the day (not the parking lot – after that) for the multi-center portion of this first-in-history Multi-Center Social!

    JPL Social Media Manager Veronica McGregor kicks things off

    It was basically a simulcast, broadcast from JPL to the other 6 centers tweetupping that day (at some point they added a 50th Anniversary social at KSC, conveniently coinciding with the rest!) as well as NASAtv!

    (Oh! Sweet! Turns out it was also streamed on Ustream, which apparently keeps the recording available online for a while! So feel free to skip my rambly bullet points and just watch it for yourself!)

    The program started off with a rapid-fire sequence of presenters, including:

    • A brief welcome from JPL Director Dr. Charles Elachi
    • A recorded message from NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden
    • Deputy Administrator Lori Garver spoke about why we’re going to Mars at all!
    • Dave Lavery, NASA Program Executive for Solar System Exploration, talked the difficulty of landing on Mars.
    • Clara Ma! – no longer eleven – read the essay she wrote to suggest the name Curiosity.
    • Doug Ellison showed us the simulation of Curiosity’s landing on Eyes on the Solar System (check it out!)
    • Stephanie Smith, part of JPL’s social media team (who came to our 134 tweetup and let us hold aerogel!) acted as host/moderator/MC for the panel discussions
    • The science panel – Ashwin Vasavada, of JPL, MSL Deputy Project Scientist; Pam Conrad, from Goddard Spaceflight Center, Deputy Principal Investigator for the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument; and Ken Edget, Malin Space Science Systems, Principal Investigator for the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI – one of the 17 cameras on Curiosity, specifically at the end of the arm) – talked about why they chose to land in Gale Crater (largely the 6mi. high mountain of sedimentary rock at its center) and a bit about what the various cameras and instruments do.
    • The engineering panel – Rob Manning, MSL Flight System Chief Engineer; Adam Steltzner, EDL Phase Lead (@steltzner); Steve Lee, EDL and Surface Ops Engineer (@LeeCuriosity); and Anita Sengupta, EDL and Advanced Technologies Engineer (@Doctor_Astro) – kicked off with the “7 Minutes of Terror” video (which I’m sure most of those present had already seen at least once, but absolutely nobody minded watching again!) and discussed how complex Curiosity and her mission are, learning from and improving on past missions, actually getting to Mars, how they developed the rover and EDL systems, testing the different elements (since they can’t exactly test the whole thing together without being on Mars!), and how (and how soon) we’ll get data and pictures back from Curiosity!
    • A brief “interruption” by Astronaut John Grunsfeld (@SciAstro) just to sort of say hi and how excited he was about this mission!

    …and time for some Q&A with both panels! That’s where it really got “multi-center” – each participating NASA center had a microphone hooked into JPL and the broadcast, so tweeps could ask questions live, regardless of which Social they were physically attending! What was particularly neat to me was how many of the question-askers I had met at prior NASAtweetups! (They’re addictive!) Seriously, I think I knew at least half of the folks who got to ask questions during the broadcast!

    If you’ve ever wanted to see what this NASA Social/tweetup stuff is all about, or love tweetups but couldn’t make this one, or were there and just want to relive its awesomeness, you’re in luck! Almost 2 hours of NASA-y goodness are just a play button away!

    The next and final segment of the NASA Glenn edition of the Curiosity NASA Social featured GRC’s resident Mars Expert, Geoffrey Landis. We had a whole hour to pick his brain, so covered quite the array of topics – everything from how rovers’ landing sites are selected, the weather on Mars, and a ton about Martian geography, to what it’ll take to get a manned mission to Mars, to how the Mars of science fiction relates to non-fictional Mars! As it happens, he has a pretty unique perspective on that last bit – being both a NASA scientist and award-winning sci-fi author! (Definitely going to have to check out his stories!)

    We wrapped up, presented our lovely hosts with a poster signed by the tweeps, and hopped on the buses on last time to head back to our cars. A quick group photo with GRC in the background, and the our NASA Social came to its end… but only officially! Most of us just relocated across the parking lot to the 100th Bomb Group Restaurant for an early dinner and drinks and a few more hours of NASASocializing with our fellow spacetweeps! (Thanks once again to @KelleyApril for organizing!)

  • Enterprise over NYC

    I drove home from DC on Saturday evening, and Enterprise was scheduled to fly (via SCA) from DC to New York on Wednesday morning, so since I hadn’t really gotten any work done (or even seen my boss in over a week, I figured I should actually go to work for a few days before taking off on another random adventure, and thus figured I’d miss this one…

    But then there was weather, and the ferry flight was pushed to Friday. Still wasn’t planning on going…
    And then, all of a sudden, I was.

    Thursday night, whatever scrap of sanity/restraint I had left snapped, and I bought a bus ticket. @CraftLass was getting a group together to watch the flyby from a pier in Hoboken, so the backdrop would be the New York skyline… and I figured out that I could take the train to the bus station in Philly, the bus to Newark, another train or two to Hoboken, meet up with the spacetweeps, watch the flyby, catch the train(s) back to Newark, bus back to Philly, train home(ish), and drive to the office by 2pm, still getting a solid couple of hours work in.

    It sounded kind of nuts, but apparently I am completely unable to resist once-in-a-lifetime views. So Friday, at the buttcrack of dawn, I was up and off!

    Of course, my brain wasn’t quite functional at that hour, so I was waiting on the wrong side of the train tracks until it was too late and thus missed my train, had to drive like a lunatic to 69th Street Station to get the subway to 30th Street just in time to run to my bus, but I made it!

    The bus even had pretty decent WiFi, so I got to watch the Soyuz landing on NASAtv on my iPad! I figured out the train to Hoboken, which dumped me out right by the pier I was aiming for, found the crew, and waited for Enterprise!

    SpaceTweeps waiting for Enterprise (Photo credit: Scott Orshan)

    And she was definitely worth the trip!

    DSC_0163

    DSC_0164
    Once again, we happened to be perfectly positioned and she flew right over our heads!
    DSC_0165
    This is how close she actually was! Not zoomed in at all!

    DSC_0166

    DSC_0170
    The flew much further on the New Jersey side than we expected, playing peek-a-boo through Hoboken!
    DSC_0174
    Never did line up with the NY skyline… this was as close as we got!

    Another gorgeous flyby! <3 (They'll be bringing her over to the Intrepid by barge sometime over the summer... hope I can make it back up to see that!) It looked like I had a decent amount of time before I needed to head back in the general direction of my bus homeward, so we went to grab some quick food, but between folks getting distracted talking to other shuttlespotters, and slightly misjudging how long it would take me to get back to Newark, I didn't get there in time, and had to daisy-chain transit systems all the way home! Two different PATH trains, NJTransit, SEPTA Regional Rail, SEPTA subway, and a 15 minute drive later, I was home. Unfortunately, it took a couple hours longer than the bus would have, so the still-working-a-half-day plan didn't quite pan out, but I regret nothing! :P :D

    *The STS-134 tweetup began one year ago today! Happy tweetupversary, 134ers!

  • #NASAtweetup 134Redux, Day 2: Launch Day!

    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!

    AstroVan, Endeavour-Bound!

    Early Morning Press Site

    Press

    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.)

    STORRM Briefing

    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.

    Tripod Land Rush

    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 seconds
    T minus 3 minutes, 59 seconds
    3...2...1...
    One 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!

    Endeavour in Flight!

    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!

    Endeavour zoom
    Zoomed/cropped version
    Plume
    The smoke plume
    Empty Launch Pad
    The 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.

    *sigh*
    Mr. Pink-tie-and-sneakers says *le sigh*
    Counting Up
    ”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 END.

  • #NASAtweetup 134Redux, Day 1: RSS Retraction

    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!
    Gary, our tour guide, again!
    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!

  • 134 TweetUp, Take 2!

    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.
    "Baby Party" Invitation

    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, 1 Days to LaunchI 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!

  • #NASAtweetup Day 0: NASAroadtrip!

    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: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.

    Next up: rest up, then tweetup!

  • Can you believe it? – a #NASAtweetup post

    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 KSCVC
    Discovery on the pad, through binoculars
    The 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.

    Endeavor launches in about 90 hours.

    ARE YOU PSYCHED YET?

    I am!               

  • "Review"

    It was brilliant, damn it.

    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.

    Figures.

  • Mmmm… eating leftover chicken cheesesteak and fries at 6am BECAUSE I CAN/i'm still awake.

    In other not-unrelated news, I have decided I’m going to start arbitrarily blaming all problems in my life on my complete and total lack of circadian rhythm.

    (Pretty sure that assessment will be 95% accurate anyways.)