Today, for maybe the second time during the whole trip, the Flyin’ Lions slept in.
We gathered up our flight suits and headed to Ellington about 10:45 a.m. While taking pictures with the KC-135 at the entrance to Ellington, we saw the day’s zero-G flight take off.
It was a warm, sunny day, so we stood outside watching all of the planes and helicopters taking off. e even saw one of the WB-57’s that had been worked on in our hangar take off. As it turned to taxi out to the runway we felt the force from its thrust. After a while, the flight returned and we greeted our USC friends who had flown.
They told us that they felt fine and had a good flight. We returned our flight suits—it was painful pulling apart the Velcro of my nametag and dropping my flight suit in the hamper. It was just one more moment signaling the end of an amazing trip.
We got our extra power supply for USC to use when prepping their experiment for a second flight, and headed to lunch with our NASA mentor. Traffic was horrible and the lights were not timed correctly. We had to stop by the hotel because I had forgotten my nametag, and ended up eating at a Mexican restaurant near our hotel.
Then we headed to meet the rest of the teams for our tour of
Next, we headed to Mission Control. First we saw Mission Control, where shuttle missions are conducted from. There was a simulation in progress when we arrived in the room separated from the control room by glass. Since I was twelve, I have wanted to work in Mission Control, so seeing it was just amazing to me.
The huge screens posted orbiter data and a world map charting the course of the orbit. It was incredible seeing all of the different consoles and the groups that have to work together to conduct a successful mission.
Next we headed over to Space Station Control. This room looked similar to Mission Control. On one giant screen there was a live feed of part of the station as seen from outside of the structure. There was a clock counting down until crew sleep time, with about 20 minutes to go.
Flight Director Heather Rarick spoke to us about the room. She graduated from my high school, Mount Lebanon, and from
We then continued to historic Mission Control of the Apollo era. I was awed, just thinking about the incredible people who had walked through this room before me. I sat at the flight director’s console and observed the relatively archaic technology in the console controls.
The last stop on our tour was the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility. There are various structures scaled to that of the shuttle and various space station modules that the astronauts use for training. They even have a Russian Soyuz spacecraft mockup!
The various mockups give the astronauts a sense for what it’s like to work with these structures full-scale. The tour guides were very knowledgeable, and it was very interesting to catch a glimpse of the sort of training that astronauts experience.
After the tour we returned to our hotel for a brief period of time. We then headed to the food store to buy hamburgers and hot dogs before heading over to a party for the reduced gravity teams hosted by the co-ops.
I learned a lot talking to the co-ops about their work. I was fascinated and jealous, because I want to work at JSC so much. We enjoyed ourselves with our new friends in the reduced gravity program. It’s really going to be hard to leave all of this.
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