I wasn’t planning on attending the second day of WordCamp Philly, since it’s focus is developers, of which I am not one (yet). I’m gradually sliding deeper down the rabbit hole, and was certainly helped along by the main event yesterday, but still not at a level at which I would consider myself a developer, even a wimpy amateur one.
But, a couple people said I should come anyway, and today’s event was even more conveniently located for me, so once again, I figured Why not? and headed on down! And once again, I’m oh-so-glad I did!
Dev Day is more free-form and hands-on than the main event, and a smaller group, so everybody’s in one [really sweet] room, hanging out and working on things and enjoying cookies as big as my face, punctuated by some informal presentations. Much to my surprise, this included a Q&A time with freaking Matt Mullenweg (co-founder/creator of WordPress (among other things), and occupant of the coolest domain name I know of, ma.tt), which tended toward the future of WordPress and the internet in general. Also, silliness.
https://twitter.com/jcasabona/status/260112705409667072
(Poor guy must have like 100 @ mentions from today!)
Jason’s hidden talent was also revealed:
And I even found a collaborator to work with on that calendar of nerdy events idea!
When the official day wrapped up, we migrated across town to Barcade, “a hybrid craft beer bar and—yep, you called it—video arcade,” (Inc.) ← (the article I mentioned a couple times tonight, by the way!) which boasts a lovely selection of beers and 80’s arcade games, as well as a really unique and tasty assortment of sandwiches and such!
The evening flew by in a constant stream of great conversations. I got to chat with Matt for a while about a variety of things, including libraries and NASAtweetups/socials (by which he seemed quite intrigued!), so he gets my seal of approval! Talked for a bit with a couple from Lancaster, and Robert from North Carolina, and at times all the separate conversations sort of merged… occasionally taking odd turns… at some point the “fun fact” I learned on the radio this morning — that if you spin a monkey at higher than 145rpm its brainstem separates from its spinal cord D= — was actually relevant (re: Felix Baumgartner’s jump)! Towards the end of the night, I discovered that the guy I’d been sitting next to lives a 10 minute walk from my house! It’s that sort of small, crazy world!
Heading out, I gave Chris (who wore the awesome penguin costume yesterday) a ride to the train station. Unfortunately, there were some issues with the roads we were on suddenly veering off unannounced or disappearing altogether, resulting in a depressingly impressive number of wrong turns and wild guesses, a surprise detour to New Jersey, and the “scenic tour” of far too much of Philadelphia!
Thank goodness, we had plenty of time, so managed to still get him to his train and home! He said he’d owe me a beer next time he’s in town, but really I owe him one or three for how absurdly long it took to get there! (I promise I actually have a decent sense of direction! Just not tonight apparently!) But hey, we had a fun little adventure?! All’s well that ends well!
Made it back the next morning only a few minutes late (for which I am rather impressed with myself, running on 2.5 hours sleep and not being able to remember/find what time I was supposed to get there), and settled in for another awesome day of spacey goodness!
We started off with Gilles Leclerc, Director General of Space Exploration, welcoming us and giving an overview of the Canadian Space Agency and what all it’s up to! CSA is a small agency, with around 700 employees and an annual budget of only $250 million. (Curiosity cost about 10 times that!) But – by partnering with other/larger space agencies (Canada is the only non-European cooperating member country of the ESA… Austrialia is probably jealous!), and keeping focused on specific areas of expertise (especially robotics and small science satellites, rather than developing their own launch vehicle), CSA is able to make significant contributions and maintain a major presence in the space industry, maximizing the bang for their buck!
Next, we had a special surprise call-in guest – Astronaut David Saint-Jacques (@Astro_DavidS)! He was actually on vacation with his family, but was kind enough to interrupt his vacation and take some time out to chat with us spacetweeps over Skype! Very nice guy! He’s an engineer, medical doctor, astrophysicist, and commercially licensed pilot, who was selected as part of the 20th Astronaut class in 2009, and is currently stationed in Houston, awaiting his turn in space! When asked what the hardest part of being an astronaut is, he said it was maintaining balance – not totally geeking out over how cool it is and completely losing yourself in your job! I bet! (And he hasn’t even been to space yet! Just wait…) 😀 The best part is the people you work with. 🙂
Then it was tour time! The first stop was the Space Technologies Lab – an area with a bunch of cleanrooms where they develop and assemble small satellites and such (sensitive work that they did not want photographed… tweeting was okay though!) Favorite factoid from this bit of the day was that satellites in Low Earth Orbit can turn themselves using electromagnets and the Earth’s magnetic field! (But satellites in geo-stationary orbits can’t, because they’re too far out and the magnetic field isn’t strong enough out there!)
In the Space and Planetary Sciences Lab, we saw the Earth version of MSL’s Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS)! (Which, my brain actually absorbed this time, takes in small soil samples and analyzes the contents for evidence of past – or maybe even present – life on Mars!) This version is briefcase-sized, while the one on Curiosity is about the size of a Rubik’s Cube, because the one they sent to space needed to be as compact and lightweight as possible, but without launch restrictions, this only needed to be portable enough for people to carry so they were able to make it larger and more powerful for faster results! (They take it out to test a variety of samples on Earth, to which they’ll compare the results we get from Mars!)
Visiting Research Fellow, Pablo Sobron Sanchez, explains the APXS (Earth edition)!
Curiosity has a limited number of “clean samples” it can take – it only has 24 containers, which can be reused, but residue from earlier tests may contaminate the new sample, giving less accurate results – so they have to be somewhat selective with the samples they take. To decide where they most want to test, they’ll use data from the other MSL instruments and cameras, as well as images we’re already getting from various orbiters. All of those images are actually available on the internet for anyone to look at, and if you’re so inclined, to study and do science with!
Next, we met Operations Engineer Mario Ciaramicoli, in a massive sort of split-level garage-y-type robotics lab with a whole lot going on! The upper part of the room was dominated by a full-scale engineering model of the Canadarm2, which is currently in service on the International Space Station. (Its predecessor served aboard and retired with the space shuttles – Endeavour’s Canadarm recently returned to Canada and is chillin’ in the lobby!)
Canadarm2 is a couple meters longer than the original, has an extra joint and greater rotation in all of its joints, and was designed so that its joint motors and computers and such can be replaced on orbit for much simpler repairs and maintenance. However, the coolest part, to me, is that it doesn’t have one fixed “shoulder” end, with the “hand” opposite – rather, it has identical ends that can both attach to the station or go off and be the working end, or even trade roles back and forth, with the acting “hand” grappling onto the station somewhere else, the “shoulder” releasing and becoming the hand, and so on, to “walk” around the station for greater access! It can also connect with Dextre, the smaller two-armed robot, for more complicated work that would otherwise require an astronaut to go EVA, but can instead be done by the robot, controlled from inside the station!
We got to see the Mission Control room from which Canadarm2 and Dextre operations on ISS are supported, as well as the simulator where all the engineers, astronauts/cosmonauts, and mission/flight controllers who will be involved with using the arm come for training before they can be certified as robotics operators, and go on to more specific training for their particular missions!
A major part of Mario’s job is preparing the new programming for missions… basically every time they use the arm, they have to write a new program to operate the arm! For tasks similar to ones they’ve done before, it’s pretty simple to just update the numbers for component masses and other parameters, but for something totally new, they have to pretty much start from scratch, and it takes months and months of programming and running simulations to verify it will do what they tell it to when they try it for real in space! Craziness!
Our Canadian Astronauts poster in the hallSweet ISS mural!
Our last destination for the morning was the exhibit hall, where they have models of a bunch of Canadian satellites and other projects Canada contributed to. Senior Engineer Marie-Josée Potvin gave us the rundown of all the ones present, and also stuck around to eat lunch with us!
This model of RADARSAT-1 is actually hanging over the main lobby, but there’s another smaller of the same in with the rest!Tweeps learning about the James Webb Space TelescopeModel of the James Webb Space TelescopeMicrovariability & Oscillations of Stars (MOST) microsatellite Marie-Josée explains SCISAT (actual size!) monitors the ozone by sucking some in through a small hole on the underside (not that big one – it radiates heat)
After lunch, it was rover time! We heard from the folks in the Exploration Development and Operations Centre, where they’re working on the infrastructure to monitor/support/control robotic exploration missions from the ground. They decided to go with workstations around the perimeter of the room and a large table in the center, for a more collaboration-friendly layout for the control room than the traditional rows of consoles – you’re monitoring your station, discover something that needs discussion and a decision, so you can just turn around to confer with your team at the table, and then go back and do your thing! (Makes sense to me!)
We paused in the Rover Integration Facility (read: giant rover garage/workshop) on our way outside, and saw a variety of components and rovers, including a Jeep-sized one with seats that can be driven remotely, as a robotic explorer, but could also be used for manned exploration in the future!
Outside, we discovered the Analogue Terrain – a big field of sand and gravel with various inclines and heaps of rocks, approximating a variety of ground conditions similar to those one might encounter on Mars or the moon! And boy were we glad it was a nice day out (gorgeous, in fact), because ROVERS! Two of them were out playing in their big sandbox – okay, engineers with RC controllers were calling the shots, but ROVERS!
They drove them around a while and showed us the nifty things they could do to get around better, and we checked out the mobile version of the remote operations center.
Then, at some point, I look back over and the rovers are coming over to visit! Turned out, they were going to be part of the group for our group picture! We got to check them out up-close-and-personal, and I even got to hug one! (Yes, I’m a nerd. We know this. But ROVERS! For machines, they’re adorable!)
MSL Curiosity CSAtweetup group photo in the Analogue Terrain (Photo credit: CSA)
Eventually we headed back inside to hear about the Artic Expedition that engineering grad student Raymond Francis (@CosmicRaymond) took part in earlier this summer, to determine whether a certain very large hole in the ground on Victoria Island was, in fact, an impact crater! It was an especially exciting and successful expedition, because they not only confirmed that it is and impact crater, but also found it’s basically a really good one (to study), because it has excellent examples of geological features only found in impact craters and… general geological interesting-ness. (My brain was kind of overflowing at this point, so pardon the particulars not quite sticking.) Besides the geologists one would logically send on this sort of expedition, the team also included Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, who is not a geologist – they were training him in the basics of conducting a geological survey (I think… pretty much), so when he’s hypothetically off exploring some other planet, he’ll know what to look for to take photos or samples of that will be interesting for geologists back home to study! Neat!
We ended the day with Jean-Claude Piedboeuf, Director of Space Exploration Development, discussing the future of space exploration in general, and of course Canada’s in particular! The near future is obviously going to be humans sticking to the ISS while we learn more about the effects of living in space long-term, and robots doing the planetary exploration. More long-term, as you might expect, we want to get to Mars, and back to the moon, but in what order, and whether or not to throw a station at the Lagrange Point between Earth and the Moon into the mix or not depends who you ask! I can’t wait to see what happens… 🙂
A timeline/overview chart of the various agencies’ & companies’ planned space exploration missions for the upcoming decade
As we were “leaving” (which bore a striking resemblance to “not leaving,” as we just kept pausing and chatting!) I discovered that @Colin_H_Hart goes to Ursinus College, which is 14 miles from my office! (Plus, he happens to currently living in Cleveland, where I had also just come from.) Funny how that happens… going to another country and meeting someone from basically back home! Small world. 🙂 Turns out we were also staying in the same hotel, and he was car-less, so I gave him a lift back, and he introduced me to a deli he’d discovered around the corner that makes very tasty sandwiches!
Headed back to the hotel, ate, watched the Curiosity press conference and popped into the Twitter for a bit, and then sleep deprivation punched me in the face and I went to bed pretty early. In the morning I packed up, checked out, and began the long drive back.
The long drive back
It was actually only about 45 minutes to the border heading straight south (as opposed to the couple hours meandering east along the Canadian side of the border my route coming from Ohio had taken), but then I sat in traffic/line for probably a solid hour waiting to get through the immigration checkpoint. (There had only been one other car in sight at the little boondocksy crossing I’d come in through!) When I did get up to the booth, I thought it was hilarious that the guy asked exactly the same questions as the one who let me in had – not just the obvious “Where are you from?” and “What are you doing in Canada?” but when I answer that with “Going to an event at the Canadian Space Agency,” they both responded, “Are you some kind of engineer or something?” What? Nobody but engineers ever goes to the CSA? 😛 Guess they never heard of tweetups!
The next few hours were boring, but pretty… way-upstate New York is pretty much mountains and trees and not much else. (Not even proper food at the rest-stops, just vending machines!) Other than being a bit hungry by the time I got back to civilization, it was a nice drive! And then my GPS stopped cooperating just as I got new NYC, so I missed the exit I needed and accidentally took a little detour to the Bronx, and got turned around in some sketchy part of New Jersey trying to find my way back to a road that would take me to PA. (Anywhere in PA, just get me out of Jersey!) Eventually made it back to the Garden State Parkway, which at least went in the general direction of things I know.
After a little while, I saw a reststop had really cheap gas, so I went to stop and fill up… only right as I got on the exit ramp, I felt a thump that made me pretty sure I’d just gotten a flat tire. The service station was right there anyway, so I rolled over at a crawl, and asked the attendant to look at it… turned out it was not only flat, but had shredded! GONE. Lovely.
Now, I’m perfectly capable of changing my own tire, but I’d been driving for about 10 hours at this point and feeling lost in freakin’ Jersey for the last while, so I was at my wit’s end, and the attendant said he’d help me change it if I could wait a few minutes, so I did. It took a little longer than I would have liked, but he came back over, hauled the spare out of its hole in the back of my car… and said he’d be back again in a few more minutes. I was tired, so I figured whatever, and waited. After rather a long while, I wondered where the hell he’d gotten to, and asked one of the other guys pumping gas… who said the guy’d left! Jackass!
None of the rest of them seemed inclined to help me out, and by this point I was too tired and flippin’ angry to think straight, much less figure out the stupid jack, so I tried calling AAA – but apparently New Jersey won’t let them on certain roads, so they had to transfer me to some NJ highway something. I was just about to get them to send somebody out, when some random guy getting gas saw me on the phone and staring at my retard car looking like I wanted to kill something mechanical – “I know that look,” he said – and asked me if I wanted help. I gladly accepted, he swapped the tire-less wheel for the donut in about 3 minutes, made sure it had air, and reminded me not to go too fast on it and to pay it forward. I assured him I wouldn’t and would, respectively, thanked him profusely, finally got that cheap gas, and limped off home at 45mph with Marian Call’s “From Alaska” disc (my new comfort/sanity music) on repeat!
Despite a mildly craptacular ending, it was an awesome trip! I had expected to be pretty exhausted and sick of driving after all that, but seems even 6 days away, 1700 miles, and a blown tire didn’t wear out my roadtrip love!
Thanks to the lovely folks at NASA Glenn and the Canadian Space Agency for your hospitality, and to everybody behind Curiosity and NASA and CSA in general for doing awesome things for us spacetweeps to geek out over! I am so excited for all Curiosity’s pictures and science over the next two (and hopefully several more) years! Happy roving! 🙂
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!)
Okay, so technically one was a “Social” – NASA decided to start letting Facebook and Google+ followers in on the #NASAtweetup awesomeness, so they changed the name to #NASASocial – but Canada’s was still #CSAtweetup!
Two days after Thanksgiving, NASA launched the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) “Curiosity” rover on an 8.5 month journey to our dusty red neighbor – a journey we knew would end, one way or the other, around quarter after 1am (EDT) Sunday night/Monday morning. In June, as we spacetweeps suspected/hoped, they announced there would be a NASAsocial for the Mars landing, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (where Curiosity was built)! I registered, of course, but didn’t get selected.
I don’t know if it was the plan all along, or if they were just overwhelmed by the response, but a couple days later they added 5 more NASAsocials, all at the same time (Friday, August 3rd) at different NASA centers! (The first multi-center NASAsocial!) Soon, the Canadian Space Agency announced they’d have a tweetup too, during the landing and the following day.
I, of course, registered for everything, figuring I’d probably worn out my welcome/luck by now and wouldn’t get in to any official events, but was fine too since there were epic #RogueTweetup plans in the works…
But then I got one of those lovely confirmation notices… from Canada! So the question was if I could get my passport renewed in time! …and then, I got ANOTHER confirmation notice, this one from NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio!
Cue a moment of panic as I tried to decide which I’d rather go to – be part of the first multi-center social, or be in a space agency for the landing itself? (Surely I couldn’t go to both… two tweetups for the same landing?!)
But then the “Why the heck not?!” sector of my brain kicked in with the realization that this wasn’t exactly trying to be in two places at once (there’s a whole Saturday in between!), and neither NASA nor CSA had said anything to the contrary, so theoretically, I could do both… It was just a matter of sorting the logistics.
Sorting the logistics
I looked at flights, but then remembered I’m not quite old enough to make rental cars a viable option, and the thought of trying to mooch rides between airports and hotels and space centers in two different cities (countries!) when I wasn’t sure who I’d know where, plus getting home from the Philly airport at the end (since my family’d be on vacation by the time I got back)… well, it sounded like it would be less exhausting/stressful to just drive!
A quick consultation with the GoogleyMaps confirmed each leg of the journey would be a full-but-reasonable-day’s drive (about 8/10/8 hours, respectively), and I like driving and traveling alone… plus, I mean, what’s the difference between my typical work day, in which I spend 8 or 9 hours sitting in a chair staring at a screen, and spending those hours sitting in my car staring out the windshield?!
So I declared it a plan, and surprisingly, though they didn’t see the appeal, neither parent tried very hard to dissuade me. My dad informed me that my uncle’s house is within a reasonable commute to NASA Glenn, so I called him up and made plans to crash there for the first stop, and thanks to recommendations from CSAtweetup’s lovely organizer, Magalie, I found a nice and very reasonably priced hotel near CSA HQ, so I had the “somewhere to sleep” thing covered.
The only other question mark in this nutty plan was whether I could get my passport renewed in time for Canada to let me in at all, much less to a secure government building… an extra $60 and applying in person will get you a passport pretty quickly, but the earliest available appointment was Monday morning the week I’d be leaving, so I was a bit nervous, but it turns out, the Philadelphia Passport Agency is seriously on their game!
I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to get there, park, find it, and get through security, so I left plenty of cushion time… and ended up arriving at 9:05, when my appointment wasn’t until 10. Despite warnings that they wouldn’t let you in more than 15 minutes early, and you could be waiting several hours regardless of your appointment time, they let me in right away, checked to make sure I had everything I needed and gave me a number, I waited about half an hour, had my “appointment” (through a bullet-proof ticket window), and was walking back to my car before my scheduled appointment time, assured my passport would be ready to pick up on Wednesday morning! (which it was, and the return visit took all of 3 minutes.) Solidly impressive for government bureaucracy!
Passport in hand, I *finally* felt free to get excited! I loaded up the iThing with music and audiobooks, threw some clothes and my toothbrush in the car, and roadtripped the heck out of Thursday!
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!
Once again, we happened to be perfectly positioned and she flew right over our heads!This is how close she actually was! Not zoomed in at all!
The flew much further on the New Jersey side than we expected, playing peek-a-boo through Hoboken!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!
I’d thought after the space shuttles retired, I’d be done chasing them… but then they announced their “retirement plan” would be moving them to various museums – Atlantis staying at KSC, but Discovery to the National Air & Space Museum’s annex outside of DC, Enterprise moving from there to the Intrepid Air & Sea Museum in NYC, and Endeavour heading out to California somewhere – all traveling via the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA), previously used to life Enterprise for test landings and retrieve orbiters that landed at Edwards.
To move a shuttle with the SCA, they tow the orbiter into this giant crane thing and hoist it up, then drive this specially-rigged 747 under it, and lower the orbiter onto the top and attach them. And then they fly the 747 with a frelling space shuttle orbiter on its back to wherever, and reverse the process. Check out the three days of work it took to get Discovery mated to the SCA in this spiffy 2-minute timelapse video!
Seriously, planes playing piggy-back. I had to see that in person. So, I knew I’d be finding somewhere to watch Discovery landing at Dulles, and it turned out the Udvar-Hazy Center, where she’ll be replacing Enterprise, is right next to the airport, and announced they’d be open to the public for watching the flyover and landing, as well as for the official welcome ceremony a couple days later, so I told work I’d be out most of that week and made plans to crash at my cousin’s house!
(There was also an official “NASA Social” (they decided to let Facebook and Google+ count, so can’t call them TweetUps anymore) which I didn’t get into, but that wasn’t going to stop me! (Or anyone else, apparently!))
As ridiculously excited as I was to see Discovery flying in on top of a 747 and hang out with spacetweeps all week, it’s also really sad. Putting these lovely orbiters in museums makes the end of the shuttle program seem real. The final flight was sad, but Atlantis was still intact and flying on her own… but Discovery’s been stripped down, engines and other components replaced with mock-ups, and carried and towed to her final destination… as much as it’s celebrated as a “welcome” or “retirement party,” it kind of feels more like a viewing on Tuesday and a funeral or wake on Thursday… D,: waaaah.
Just have to keep telling myself that it is retirement, and like many old people, she’ll be hanging around in the museum to educate and inspire generations of youngsters to do great spacey things!
Flyover
We were told they’d do one big, looping flyby for photo ops with various landmarks and monuments before coming in for landing, so we knew we were going to get two pretty nice passes, but didn’t know exactly how close or where, or how much of the landing we’d be able to see. So everybody was terribly excited when we first caught sight of that double silhouette, and it appeared to be heading right for us!
And then there was a great deal of screaming and cheering as she flew right over our heads!
We waited excitedly for the piggy-back planes to come back around and land…
This time around they flew more in front of us than directly over us.
*squee!*
At which point we realized the SCA didn’t have her landing gear down, so she couldn’t be landing then, as we’d thought… We were gonna get another pass! We still weren’t completely sure what we’d be able to see when she did aim for the landing strip, but then, after another long loop around, we caught sight of this:
Sad to think that was the last time we’ll see Discovery flying. 🙁
After that I headed inside to check out Enterprise before they moved her out of her long-time residence, and take a peek around the rest of the museum.
She looks enormous from this angle!…Not so much from this one.
At some point, somebody mentioned we could go up in the tower to the observation deck, so we did, and guess what we saw?!
Discovery on the SCA! And a passenger plane landing right by them! And over to the left, the crane they’ll use to de-mount Discovery!
Swag Swap Dinner
Between the folks that were actually part of the official NASAsocial and the herd of us that just showed up and declared it a #RogueTweetUp, there were rather a lot of space tweeps in the area to welcome Discovery and give Endeavour a proper send-off! We thought we should have one big gathering at some point while we were all more or less in one place, so on Wednesday, the day between Discovery’s arrival and the welcome ceremony, after most folks spent the day sightseeing in DC, we made one massive dinner reservation and took over like half of a lovely Italian restaurant – family style, like the big nerdy space family we are!
Since many tweeps had brought little bits of swag to share, whether extras from prior tweetups or places of employment (NASA centers or otherwise) or other random geeky events, it had been declared this gathering would be the ideal time to swap some swag! (Thanks to @KelleyApril and @LibbyDoodle for organizing everybody and making the reservation!)
Official “Welcome Discovery” Ceremony
The next morning it was back to the Udvar-Hazy Center to welcome Discovery to her new home! I was up and out pretty early, but detoured to pick up @fedward and @EmilyKnits from the Metro, and then some very necessary caffeine from the Starbucks, so by the time we got there Enterprise (and half a gazillion people) were already out behind the hangar waiting for Discovery. I made my way to just about the front, and found AstroTimmy! (and @Stephonee, of course!)
Soon they began to tow Discovery around from her hiding place…
Discovery accompanied by a parade of her astronauts!…and followed by her support crew.
She was welcomed by the Marine Drum and Bugle Corps, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, Astronaut/Senator John Glenn, other distinguished speakers, and thousands of adoring shuttle lovers!
Enterprise and Discovery reunited*ShuttleSnuggle* Crazy how worn Discovery looks next to bright shiny Enterprise!
”I
Eventually, it was time to move Discovery into the hangar, so they pulled Enterprise back out of the way, and then towed Discovery in!
But her tail wasn’t quite lined up right with the taller slot of the hangar door, so they had to back up and try again!
…and this time, they got it perfectly!
Popped inside then, and it was too crowded to stay long or see much, but I did get a quick glimpse of Discovery safely tucked into her new home! I’ll definitely have to go back sometime soon (and drag my Dad along) to hang out with this lovely orbiter more, and explore the rest of the museum properly!
SpaceTweeps are fun!
Most of us were planning to leave Saturday morning, so Friday evening a herd of us gathered once again… not quite as large a crew as the Swag Swap dinner, but a good bunch of very awesome people went out for drinks, and then gelato! And then we just kept chatting outside the gelato place for ages. 🙂
Well, I sure didn’t expect to get into another NASAtweetup so soon after a launch tweetup, but I don’t think I could ever bring myself to not try if there was any chance I could make it, and what do ya know? I got another of those lovely emails with “CONFIRMATION” in the subject line!
I wasn’t familiar with Langley Research Center before this (and was momentarily slightly disappointed to discover it had nothing to do with the CIA 😛 ) but this was remedied promptly upon arrival, as Charlie Harris, Langley’s Director of Research, welcomed us with an overview of the center.
A few tidbits he shared:
Langley Research Center (LaRC) was one of the first to aeronautics research centers! It predates NASA itself by more than 40 years, having been established by NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) in 1917.
Viking (first Mars lander) was a Langley project
The technology to safely land the Mars Science Lab Curiosity rover was developed at LaRC and they’re now researching to how to land humans on Mars (requires 100 times the mass we’ve ever landed on Mars before)
Collaborating with Sierra Nevada on developing a new shuttle-esque commercial launch vehicle to service ISS
Langley researchers were the first to identify the hole in the ozone layer!
Once we were thoroughly welcomed and impressed, we loaded up the bus and went to the hangar, where we paused for the now traditional group photo before splitting into two groups. My group started with atmospheric researcher Mike Obland to learn about Airborne Science at Langley. My initial mental picture of a mad scientist titrating something in the back of a Cessna and dropping things out the window aside, it’s pretty cool. They outfit these little planes with a bunch of scientific instruments, and fly around collecting data, which they use to study smog, weather, climate change, forest fires, etc!
Then the groups switched, and mine went over to engineer Bruce Fisher for the Flight Services overview. He told us more about the aircraft in the hangar, as well as the hangar itself. He pointed out this weird orange crane on tracks on the ceiling – and what it was used for, it turns out, was to practice docking procedures, before there were computer simulators! They’d actually hoist up two mock-up modules/capsules, and the astronauts who would have to maneuver them into position for real in space, later on, would practice docking suspended in mid-air in this very hangar! Before Houston became took over that end of things, all the early astros trained at Langley!
After the hangar, we headed over to the Reid Conference Center, where we had lunch and heard from Astronaut Susan (Still) Kilrain all about living and working in space! She flew on STS-83 and STS-94, which were actually the same mission with the same crew, but had a fuel cell problem the first time around, so the mission got cut short (4 days). But the mission was deemed “too important not to do” so they turned it around and re-launched 90 days later!
“There is a restroom all the way up the elevator before you get into the shuttle. They have determined that it is impossible for a female to use that restroom, and I have so proven them wrong. …a Navy pilot can pee just about anywhere.”
They test you for claustrophobia by sticking you inside a beachball sort of thing, turning all the lights out, and leaving you there without telling you for how long. (She fell asleep.)
They flew a stationary bike (with a seatbelt) for exercise… so one day she biked around the world! It took an hour and a half.
Her job when not flying as as CapComm. Apparently the only people allowed to talk to an astronaut in space is another astronaut or the Flight Surgeon, so that was her when someone else was in space! Astronauts do get to call their family twice while their in space, and email, but everything is monitored (to make sure they don’t get too stressed or upset). If your family writes to you while you’re in space and says you’re dog died, they won’t tell you until you get back.
After her presentation and some questions from the tweeps, we got to take pictures with her and get her autograph! Then we were off again, and split back into two groups for the next tours.
My new group started in the U.S National Transonic Facility Pressurized Air/Cryogenic Wind Tunnel… which basically means they can adjust the pressure and temperature of the air running through the wind tunnel, so the molecules are closer together in proportion to scaled-down models, for more accurate results! (I think I understood that, anyway!) We got to see the shop in which they make the models to test, the wind tunnel itself (from the outside), and the control room.
The facility manager, Roman Paryz, showed us around, and also gave us a little cryogenics demonstration with a bucket of liquid nitrogen! He dipped a partially-inflated balloon (which appeared to deflate as the air inside cooled and compressed, then “re-inflated” as it warmed back up), a leaf (which got very brittle and snapped into pieces), and a cupful of Cheez-Itz (which were delightfully cold and still tasty)! Pouring liquid nitrogen out on the floor was really cool too – like tiny fog, it formed a roiling layer of cloud about 6 inches deep, skimming over the floor!
Then he asked if we had any questions, or anything else we wanted to see frozen. I thought about what might be interesting to dip in liquid nitrogen… and remembered I had a pair of clean (brand new) socks serving as camera lens cases in my bag, so I pulled one out and offered it up! I was slightly surprised, and everyone was amused when he actually accepted, and dunked it! I had kind of hoped it would make like the leaf and shatter so I’d have little sock fragments to share, but apparently acrylic knits don’t react so entertainingly… just got kind of frosty!
Next, we walked over to Structures and Materials lab, where we learned about some (*gasp!*) structures and materials they’re working on there! One was the Inflatable Reentry Vehicle Experiment (IRVE-3), which will allow us to land bigger, heavier payloads on planets with an atmosphere (such as Mars), by using an inflatable heat shield (a wide cone of concentric inflatable rings, with a thermal protection system wrapped around it)! Normal, rigid heat shields, can only be as big as the launch vehicle is wide, thus limiting the amount of mass it can safely land. But a heat shield that can fly packed in and deploy when it’s time for reentry can be much larger, with more surface area for air resistance and heat distribution, so we can send more stuff!
Lucky for us, Dr. Mia Siochi didnt realize that her demonstration wasn’t actually intended for us (apparently there was a group of bigwigs coming through after us), so we got to hear about some really fascinating emergent materials, which NASA is trying to accelerate the development of. Different ways of constructing metal parts, carbon nanotubes (forming a material 20 times stronger than carbon fiber materials, and still lighter), self-healing materials (they took it to the gun range to test how it’d heal around bullets!), and engineered surfaces (minimizing friction to improve aerodynamics… or super RainEx)… seriously cool stuff to a nerd like me!
Then we got to go in a model lunar habitat! It’s inflatable too, so it could be bigger than the launch vehicle would otherwise allow, and on the moon or anywhere without an atmosphere, normal air pressure on the inside would hold it in place! A bunch of those connected together on the moon would make a pretty sweet place to live!
The last stop on our Langley tour was the Landing Impact Research/Hydro Impact Basin Facility, to see a test drop of the Orion capsule! The structure is called the gantry, and I guess it’s basically a stationary crane (though it looks more like a giant swingset), which they use to lift up air/space craft and then drop them, to see how they hold up when falling/landing/crashing at various speeds/angles/rotations/etc. It’s where Neil Armstrong learned to land on the moon! (A real-life simulator, like the docking crane in the hangar.) Since then, however, they dug the Hydro Impact Basin, to test water landings.
For this test (the third), an engineering model of Orion was suspended from the gantry tilted slightly forward (leading with its side, rather than full on the heat shield), and pulled back so it would swing down to the basin, going 22mph horizontally when it was released from its bracket.
We watched as they drew it back and up, then let it swing, released from the bracket over the water, and then a huge splash!
It seemed to strike the water pretty much level, and even tipped back a little, but its forward momentum was great enough that as it bobbed in the water, it also plowed through it and gradually tipped forward, rolling over/through the crash barrier, and eventually settling into “Stable 2” – NASA-speak for upside-down!
We watched as the tidal wave of displaced water approached and receded, and a dude in a little raft paddled out and rigged some sort of loop around the capsule, which a little crane then used to flip Orion back upside-up. We hung out there a while, and eventually hopped back on the bus and returned to the little cafeteria where we had started the day to wrap things up.
But turns out, the wrap-up didn’t have to be the end! It was the end of the official tweetup, but Langley Research Center has its own little actual bar called Afterburners, and our lovely tweetup hosts and another NASA guy invited any tweeps who could/wanted to stay a little longer to join them there for “unofficial debriefing” over drinks and snacks! Of course, I wasn’t about to turn that down, (and they even said my Dad could join us if he wanted, so I called him and he did) and a small herd of spacetweeps and NASA employees and a bonus Daddy got to sit around chatting for a bit, complete with free beer!
NASA sure does know how to show a geek a good time! <3
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!
![[Very] Frozen sock!](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7132/7607819334_bc2c589626.jpg)
I got through security pretty quickly, and ran frantically through the airport, only to discover there was still a frakking line at the gate! >.<