NASA

We can not deny it, these are exciting times!

As a NASA and space fan since I was a little kid, I still remember how difficult it was for me to get information about the Space Program. I even went to the US Embassy in Buenos Aires once, asking for the NASA address (yes, the physical one). My mom came with me of course. "I need the NASA address so I can write a letter to them," I said at the reception desk, with security guards looking at me. I wanted pictures, posters, astronaut autographs, everything. They gave me the address and a couple of official NASA pictures of Shuttle Columbia as well. Wow...just imagine my face on my way out of the Embassy...I was in orbit, experiencing free fall.

I followed the Shuttle Program over the years on TV, radio, newspapers, checking for every mission, if crews were okay, if X or Y satellite was successfully deployed or if Galileo was finally on its route to Jupiter. I was also reading books, lots of them, and from time to time receiving an envelope from NASA in the mail with pics, posters, press kits...stuff that I still keep to these days.

(Cape Canaveral, FL) -- The space shuttle Discovery left earth orbit this morning and glided home across America's heartland with a sunrise landing upon America's Space Coast.

(CAPE CANAVERAL, FL) -- A prototype of an advanced space plane by the U.S. Air Force will make it's debut on Thursday as it heads into space a top an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral.

The 29-foot long, 11,000-pound Orbital Test Vehicle (X37-B) is a white winged craft with a similar style as the U.S. space shuttle.

"The OTV has the potential to revolutionize how the Air Force operates in space by making space operations more aircraft like and adding in the capability for returnable plug-and-play experiments," David Hamilton, Director of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities office stated last week.

In 1999, NASA begun the X37 project, however the space agency handed it over to DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in September 2004. DARPA is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.

DARPA, originally formed in 1958 as the Advanced Research Projects Agency, is an office designed to prevent technological surprises against the United States, such as the Soviets launch of Sputnik in 1957.

The Monty Python movie And Now, for Something Completely Different, which contains sketches from the group's Flying Circus TV show, is in my opinion a classic example of ADHD-like symptoms - do something, lose focus and switch to something else - in a series of confusing segues. It's been 2 months since Obama dropped the proposed axe on Constellation, and after reading, hearing and watching a lot of opinions about it, I'm left with a feeling that this is just one more jerking motion of a space policy in a series of other jerks and twists that can be labeled as the U.S. ADHD space policy.

Read the rest of my idea on Spacepirations - http://www.spacepirations.com/2010/04/and-now-for-something-completely.html

I invite you to share your comments - Is the new policy the best thing since sliced bread in space?

Cady Coleman asked to have a picture taken with me so she could email it to TJ Creamer after I had spoken to him! She was really nice and thought it rather funny to send the email of both of us to TJ!

This is myself and my boyfriend (in red) with NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden at the ISS 100 Day Party - he was really cool to talk too as well!

At the Expedition 22/23 100 Day Party at Cape Canaveral - Bobby Satcher and myself.

Khal's currently working on the NASA MMO Game project, "Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond." Khal is the CEO of Project Whitecard Incorporated and works with Don, Chris, Scott, and Jerod. We are rocking the serious games cradle.

On March 18th 2010 I visited the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) to see the facility here in Boulder and attend a talk by Dr. Stanley G. Love - a NASA astronaut that flew on STS-122. Founded in 1947, employing over 3,000 people in several states, SwRI is a very prolific multi-disciplinary institute, headquartered in San Antonio, Texas (for more information about the SwRI, visit its facts page). SwRI has a fairly large office (about a hundred people) in downtown Boulder Colorado.

Earlier this month I shared with you my thoughts on NASA's new vision and how the new vision could fail. And the weekend before the budget was unveiled I wrote about what I thought NASA should pursue in its future.

There has been no shortage of people sharing their thoughts on the FY2011 budget and the revamping of NASA and that is exactly how it should be.  People should be heard.  To date, the blog post in my opinion that sums things up the best is Changing Horses in Mid Stream.  If you haven't read this one yet, it's worth the time.

I wanted to do something unique, educational and cathartic with NASATweetup, something I didn't tell a whole lot of people, even those who know what I do for a living. See, they say certain people live in a bubble - the President, athletes, celebrities and even astronauts. And you know what? Those of us who work in and around the space program do too.

We all live and breathe space; that much was obvious this week. For me, it's been in my blood since at least my 3rd birthday, which was the day Skylab 2 was launched and I watched on TV. It's also the "birthday" anniversary of the Apollo program, announced before Congress on May 25, 1961. So I had no choice anyway.

All through growing up, I knew where I would live; I decided it when I was 9 years old. Fortunately for me, I live here now on the Space Coast. It was a long, convoluted journey, but I suppose when your life has a built-in purpose, it matters less the road you take to get there than it does that you get there at all.

Whew!  The JSC Tweetup is over & I've finally had some time to sit down and collect my thoughts. 

It's been a very hectic week, from working STS-130 to the Tweetup to managing to squeeze in a few world domination discussions with @flyingjenny since she was at my house, there wasn't much time to stop and take it all in.

I'm very sorry that I couldn't participate on the tour, but such is life and being a Flight Controller for a few years now I've learned that you really can't plan anything, from vacations to family events to holidays to Tweetups, everything's on hold until wheel stop - and then there's another one!  

For now at least, there's another one.  A few other ones.  Even though I wasn't able to join the actual tour, I was able to attend the events the night before and the night of the Tweetup.  I was very excited to meet everyone who I've been talking to only virtually for almost a year now.  Finally, I get to show you what we do!  

STS-130 NASA Tweetup got a message from ISS Expedition 22crew, met an astronaut and king of the flight controllers, watched live comm from Shuttle Mission Control and cruised astronaut training facilities, even seeing new AsCans hard at work!

adllewellyn, pillownaut, spasmunkey & aggieastronaut
in the BlastOff Theatre at Space Center Houston


Meeting so many folks from the Tweep Society, Facebook and Myspace was incredible. I'll be adding pictures and videos to my blog and youtube channel over the next few days and my link is: http://pillownaut.blogspot.com/

I hope other Tweeps will do the same. I'm so grateful for this site for bringing folks together; it gave me information to search out people by name so we can revel in our shared space interests!  Cont'd -->

We talk about NASA’s proposed FY2011 budget with Chris Radcliff of SpaceUp as well as how to continue the conversation during SpaceUp. 

There were so many rumors and stories last week in the news about what was to occur on Feb 1st when the Office of Management & Budget (OMB) released the President's Recommended budget for NASA for the 2011 Fiscal Year. I wrote my thoughts on course correcting our dreams to try and sum up where we were the weekend before the announcement and where I thought we needed to head.

For those of you who have been living under a rock this past week, Obama is recommending a major revectoring of NASA and the way manned spaceflight is conducted in our country. Here are some documents to peruse if you haven't seen them:

Several people have asked me recently what I think of the cancellation of the Constellation programme. I’ll leave the debate around the public versus private sector involvement in manned spaceflight, and the technical and scientific details, up to those whose job it is to argue those cases. I’m not going to give any analysis on how to deliver what has been asked of the space community, nor how to fund it. My take is somewhat different.

This blog post and associated comments has one purpose only and that is to mourn the loss of the Constellation Program and the dreams we had for returning to the moon.  The program (outside of budget realities) gave us a chance once not only to dream but to work on leaving LEO and heading to another body in our solar system with the stated of goal of learning to live off-planet including learning how to protect the human body in space for long durations.

Please share with us as we take this time to mourn the loss of a program and our associated dreams.  Examples include:

1) Share your personal dreams of what Constellation and Exploration meant to you.

2) Share how the cancellation personally affects you.

Hello my fellow spacetweeps! As we all know today was an important day for NASA, not only for remembrance but also for the teleconference that just took place at 12:30pm (eastern).

Now I find myself full of so many more questions than answers at this point and definitely don't think my thoughts could be contained in 140 character posts. Now I'll admit that most of the space jargon talk goes over my head, particularly when it comes to flight hardware and accounting issues (e.g. budgets!) but I'm left sitting here with questions.

Questions such as: What is the bigger picture? Where will we go? How will we get there? What's going to happen to KSC (why 21st century upgrades?)? Why was something so important not televised and WHY for gods sake did the administrator need to duck out of the teleconference so quickly? Yes he may have to discuss things with our international partners but this teleconference seemed mighty important and it would have been nice to at least have the administrator there to field a few questions.

Hi everyone.

I have been a fan of NASA since the late 1960's. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing (in front of the TV) on Sunday July 20, 1969.

 I currently write a weekly column on technology and will feature NASA in many of them.

Identity

Last Name: 

Mark

First Name: 

Ollig

Education: 

Telecommunications

Occupation: 

Telecommunications programmer Free lance columnist

Website: 

Bits and Bytes

So much has been written this past week in newspapers, blogs, facebook, and twitter about the fate of NASA's human spaceflight program. With every new American President the forward steps of our exploration into the Cosmos is up for renewal. That's reality for NASA being what it is; a government agency.

The Orlando Sentinel is the newspaper that started everything this week with this initial article that Obama plans to cancel the Constellation Program and the mission to return to the moon. Throughout Wednesday and into the evening, those in the space industry who use twitter found themselves venting about the "change" and the unknown future. I was one of them. A second article stated that $6 Billion over 5 years is to be provided to NASA in order to develop commercial capability of reaching Low Earth Orbit and providing an astronaut transport service to the International Space Station.

Rather than Space News we have Space Rumors: what will the future of NASA be under the Obama adminstration?

Speaking of the future, Brad Cheetham of WeWantOurFuture.org is on to discuss this project and how getting our youth interested in science and space can help NASA today.

Hello! I haven't written a bio in a long time, so I apologize in advance if this is a rambling mess. :) I am a semi-recent convert to Twitter, but I have greatly enjoyed my time in the social media network. On Twitter, I am spionchen, with the alias of Trinity. In the real world, people prefer to call me Leigh.

Identity

First Name: 

Leigh (Trinity)

Education: 

Associate of Science - Physics: Gordon College, Barnesville, GA, 2004 Associate of Arts - Psychology: Gordon College, Barnesville, GA, 2004 Bachelor's of Science - Physics: Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, 2007

Occupation: 

Process engineer at Intel - Phoenix, AZ, since 2007

Astronomy/science writer, blogger, and sentient citizen  of the universe, and science teacher in training. 

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Last Name: 

dickinson

First Name: 

david

Education: 

CCAF degree in aircraft armament technlogy; working on Bachelors in Science teaching.

Occupation: 

Retired military; blogger.

Website: 

Astroguyz

Before #nasatweetup I was just a simple KSC annual passholder. After #nasatweetup my eyes and heart were opened to quite possibly the smartest nerds it will ever be my pleasure to meet. I humbly bow to your superior geekdom.

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Education: 

AS in Film & Video Production

Occupation: 

Indie Filmmaker and Photographer

Website: 

Jen Vargas Photography

I currently work on the Ares project at MSFC as the Asst. Manager for Upperstage Manufacturing and Assembly.  Formally I worked in the MSFC Resident Office at KSC as the Space Shuttle Main Engine Project Representative.

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Last Name: 

Davis

First Name: 

Benny

Education: 

Ga Tech Alumni

Occupation: 

MSFC Asst. Manager for Ares Upperstage Manufacturing and Assembly

Just a space baby who was born on the Space Coast and thrilled to be working on the Space Coast to tell the NASA story. 

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Farmer

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Andrea

Education: 

BSBA, University of Central Florida

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Public Relations Manager at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex

Rock climbing nerd, migrant teacher, science lover, and global adventurer.

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Last Name: 

Aleya

First Name: 

Littleton

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Formal Education Coordinator for the Solar Dynamics Observatory at Goddard Space Flight Center

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Musings of a Migrant Science Teacher