This is a discussion thread for selected attendees to discuss the STS-133 tweetup NASA is hosting at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on October 31 and November 1, 2010. Tweetup details here.
NASA will inform the randomly selected #nasatweetup attendees via email beginning September 1, 2010.
If you are planning to travel to FL to watch the launch, but aren't participating in the NASA Tweetup, feel free to use this thread as well. Anywhere that SpaceTweeps gather, there are *always* meetups and fun to be had, and everyone's invited -- no need to be a NASATweetup attendee for those!
PS: No, I won't be in Florida -- just wanted to get a thread started to help folks coordinate in the usual SpaceTweep fashion! :-)
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.
For the past several years, I've been trying to find ways to motivate myself to write more. My mother was a writer, and always told me, write about what you know. I've also been in the space business, as a technical editor, among other duties, for several years. My biggest issue with writing for space is writer's block; I think it plagues most writers, at one time or another. This is also why my entry below is actually being reposted, because it came to me so naturally at the time.
Along with that, there are plenty of times I've written things, and never had the nerve to publish them. Sometimes it's difficult to find the right time or place to even do so. But lately, it seems like everyone needs some good news, wherever and whenever they find it. A year ago Christmas, we had the chance to post our thoughts online on JSC Features. That day was very special to me, and I do believe in my heart, there are more special ones in front of all of us in the space business.
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.
My engineering background (the appreciation of the incredible technology) and artistic eye (the majesty of a rocket launch) combined with a flare for excitement (sky diving) all play a part in my love for space. I suppose I also have the movie 'Space Camp' to blame for planting the seed for a sprouting space infatuation when I was just 6 years old.
The highly advanced mathematics involved, the breathtaking scenes, and the intense thrills of spaceflight truly provides the perfect storm for me. Math was never my favorite subject, I never made it past honorable mention at the Cultural Arts fairs, and maybe I've only bungee jumped a hand full of times and gone skydiving once, but the launch of a space shuttle represents every piece of me perfectly.
Two years ago today, on October 23, 2007, I earned my space enthusiast
wings: I viewed the launch of the STS-120 Shuttle mission at Kennedy
Space Center.
It all started in late July when ESA astronaut and
STS-120 crew member Paolo Nespoli, of Italian nationality, invited some
friends and me to view his launch at KSC. We had met him in previous
years, when he took part to outreach events at the planetarium of
Milan, the largest in Italy, for which we work. He was also going to
fly a small flag with our planetarium logo onboard Discovery (item 70 in
the STS-120 Official Flight Kit Manifest).
After
yesterday’s launch scrub for STS-127 due to weather, I was listening in
on some of NASA’s press conference on NASA TV. One of the reporters
asked about the weather criteria, if they were perhaps too strict now
that we have more advanced methods of assessing weather conditions than
we did when the criteria was developed, or something to that effect.
AMERICAN MEN AND WOMAN HAVE NO BUSINESS FLYING IN SPACE!
There, I’ve said it. And in case you missed it, I’ll say it again.
American men and women have no business flying in space. I fully expect
an upwelling of outrage on the part of some for saying this, yet it is,
at least to me, painfully obvious
This will
probably be one of my very few blog posts here, at least for a little
while. I just wanted to tell my story…I’ve been trying to help out,
moderating and the like, but reading everyone else’s stories…it’s hard
to just sit back and not participate.
I joined Twitter in December of 2007 hoping to score a Nintendo Wii
via mobile alerts. I did, and didn’t pay much more attention to it
until Hurricane Ike in September 2008. I posted updates of my
evacuation plans to all of my 2 or 3 followers, and didn’t visit again
until STS-119. For some reason I got a wild hair and thought people
might be interested in what I do, so during that mission I posted
updates.
If you didn’t see it already, our friend and fellow space tweep @milesobrien did a great job in his post defending shuttle workers
today. It is just too bad that we even needed defending. Apparently a
reporter at WESH (Central Florida) misconstrued the facts to make it
sound as though NASA was investigating possible actions of its
contractor workforce to delay the shuttle manifest. In other words, he
made it sound like NASA suspected us contractors of deliberately
dragging out the program to delay the inevitable end of the shuttle
program in order to keep our jobs longer.
Space. The Final
Frontier. That’s what they said on TV. When I was a kid one thing that
truly grabbed my imagination was Space. I was always one of the geeky
kids who was into science and all that mad stuff. The Space Shuttle is
one of those things that has always been ‘around’ since I was a kid. I
grew up watching Shuttle missions, I remember the very sad days of the
Challenger and Columbia disasters, watching the newsreel on the BBC in
shocked silence and wondering if this would be the end of the Space
Shuttle program. I even remember writing Space Shuttle story (with
illustrations!) in class when I was only 11 years old.
