Houston, Part 2

Teachers, if you get a chance, the Department of Education has workshops all over the country, all summer and they are free - check it out: https://www.t2tweb.us/Workshops/About.asp

One of my stops along the way to El Paso was to a great workshop at Johnson Space Center.

My brother Keith is a good one for knowing the events surrounding the Space Shuttle missions. This time one of the astronauts is from El Paso (the city is very proud). From the front page:

El Pasoan John "Danny" Olivas will live the dream of traveling to space as he and six other astronauts blast into space on space shuttle Atlantis at 5:38 MDT today from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Just a bit more interesting than P. Hilton and her fragile state of being.....

So more about the conference - we were able to sign up for two field trips. I chose Habitat, Air Revitalization and Water Reclamation and Neutral Buoyancy and Advanced Space Propulsion.

This is a 40' deep pool with a "space station" in it. The white hose is connected to an astronaut that is surrounded by divers. This is the best training they can do for what it will be like for them in space. The water is blue because it is so deep.

The scientists were pretty excited about their work - I was totally amazed. Besides building a habitat that can be replicated on the moon (2020) they are working on getting to Mars in 115 days. The air and water components were very advanced, I think a major focus is now getting the technology smaller so that it wont take up too much room on the space craft.

During lunch on the first day we contacted the space station by ham radio and listen to Suni Williams answer questions asked by teachers in the audience. We also listened to Matt Abbott (the flight director for STS-118) and a very interesting account of space travel by Astronaut Don Thomas. Among other things, I am aware of how they use the bathroom in space (that age old question - email me for details)

At lunch the second day a woman gave me her pass to the Mission Control Field trip.

Suni Williams on the space station - Hair by Zero Gravity

Me being a dope

FYI that is the actual work station for the space program until 1992 - Apollo 13 included. They had a lot of interesting factoids about the room and the equipment - like it was so antiquated that they couldn't find replacement parts and even resorted to buying some of them on EBay. Also, they had a system like they use at the drive-up tellers at the bank. Sometimes they'd send little creatures through it (once it was a tarantula - caused havoc on the whole first row of Mission Control).