06.04.09
Getting Ready for Weightlessness
I wish I could write more here about this week’s trip to Johnson and all the preparations and neat things going on before next week’s micro-g flight, but I’m just drained – not only of words because I’ve been blogging about it for work, but also just my energy level from enduring early mornings, late nights and full days. So, if you really want to know, check out my official NASA blog about the experience and I’ll try to elucidate more here soon.
One thing I will quickly say here that you won’t see on the NASA blog is my weekend plans. There are no training or flight-related activities over the weekend so my friend Andrea is flying down from Dallas to spend the weekend with me. Andrea is a good friend from Indiana but now lives in Dallas. Last time we got together was in Dallas last February (’08) when I had a long layover in Dallas while on my way here to Houston. I’m thrilled she’s coming down and know we’ll have lots of fun hanging out, shopping, gabbing, and whatever else we come up with to do.
03.26.09
Moon Tree
I want one of these moon trees — sycamore trees grown from seeds that went to the moon with Apollo 14. It would have double significance for me. The NASA thing, of course, but also my college was the Sycamores.
12.05.08
Night and Day
The 47-50 seconds marks in this time-lapse video of sunset are just awesome. You can see the exact moment when day goes to night. At 47 seconds the sky is getting dark, and 48 seconds the moon just … appears! And at 57 seconds the sky goes totally black except for the moon.
12.04.08
Goddess of Love
I took these two photos of Venus, with my iPhone, through the eyepiece of a cheap telescope. Pretty amazing.
11.22.08
Kids in Zero Gravity
There’s chatter at work that I may be sent to fly on one of the reduced-gravity flights that I spend so much of my time writing about. Part exciting, part scary.
A co-worker shared this video with me of these little kids on a simulated reduced-gravity flight with their pilot dad. Very funny to watch but kinda adds to my anxiety.
11.20.08
Station Sighting #2
I saw the space station again tonight. This time I knew better what to look for, and I was pretty excited to share the experience with my mom and my boys. Tonight was also cool because the space shuttle was docked to the station, so I actually was seeing both.
Finn wanted to know if it was my space shuttle. Actually, he first asked my mom if I was going to be on the space shuttle. (He goes to her house after school on Thursdays so was there before I was.) Poor thing still confused about exactly what mommy does at NASA (It’s OK. Some days I am too!). This mission is actually the first in a while that I haven’t met or interviewed someone up there.
Also kinda cool to see the station & shuttle on the date of my two-year anniversary with NASA and the 10-year anniversary of the station. Such a transformation for me from two years ago, when I had no awareness of the orbiting laboratory overhead, to now, when for the second time in 30 days I’ve actually seen it pass over.
11.19.08
Amazing Grace
This family has several videos on their web site of their Christmas lights synced to several different songs (Music Box Dancer, Carol of the Bells, Miracle on 34th Street, to name a few) and even one called Space Walk to the recording of an astronaut on a spacewalk. The video below is to a techno-mix of Amazing Grace.
