Tagged: cousin

meeting the fam

as i posted earlier, i made the trip to florida to watch the last night launch of the space shuttles.  i caught up with some cousins who were also in florida for the same reason.  i had been corresponding with lowell, who is actually mom’s cousin, regarding the launches.  he’s seen a few more of these, and i had asked his advice on best places to stay and where to witness the launch when i made my first trip last year.  this time, i finally got to meet them all in person.


my cousins

we had lunch at this little place off highway 520.  we all had something fried.  they had some shrimp.  i had some gator.  pictured are lowell, alice, jill, and me waiting for the fried goodness to arrive.  this was our first time getting together after they delayed the sunday morning launch.

we met up again on monday after they finally got the fuse lit on endeavour.  we were much more tired the second time around after being up for two nights and not getting all the sleep we needed in between.  nevertheless, it was good to hang out with family.  lowell, alice, and i took a drive down florida 1A1 (atlantic avenue) from cocoa beach past patrick air force base and into a bit of satellite beach.  lowell pointed out what was around back in days of nasa when the moon landing was still the goal.  many of the places he showed me i’ve been reading about in the right stuff.  as with all beach locations, it has been built up much more than it was when alan shepherd and john glenn were being jettisoned into space on rockets.

i’ve uploaded a few photos of the launch that morning to my flickr account tagged “sts-130.” the video turned out the best on my attempts to capture the launch, but those are what i have.  of course, nasa has the best pics in the world for these things.  incredible angles of the launch.  nasa’s collection of photos of the launch, which again doesn’t do the actual site justice. i credit nasa with this image of the launch which the closest i could find to how it actually looked if you had been there.  it comes from nasa’s site, but i couldn’t seem to locate it again for a link.

sts-130

just a few more shuttle missions this year, and the fleet will be retired from use.  sts-130 is the 130th shuttle mission and the 32nd mission to the international space station.  they will be delivering the tranquility node, a seven windowed module which will serve as the control room for the station’s robotic arm. target launch date is currently set in the early morning of february 7, 2010.  endeavour is the shuttle of choice.

my mom has a cousin whose daughter, jill, is the engineering branch chief in the aircraft operations division at johnson space center.  in 1994, she was considered as an astronaut candidate.  but her work with the t-38s is more notable.  she helped upgrade the avionics to these aircrafts in the early 1990s.  you can read more about this and the t-38s in the june 2008 edition of the johnson space center newsletter, “roundup” [pdf].  (the pdf is a better format for reading.)  nasa tv has a clip (on youtube) of the dress rehearsal of the astronauts for sts-130.  the jets in the beginning of this video are t-38s.

with someone from nasa twittering about the shuttle launches and everyone else in the virtual world responding and posting tweets of their own, you can follow an interesting stream of chatter about the sts-130 launch at twitter’s search page.

you can watch a time lapse account of the shuttle endeavour being rolled out from the vab to the pad.  four hours shortened to to less than three minutes.