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Saturday, May 15, 2010

Fly Me to the Moon

Ray and I were recently introduced to some of
my sister's astronaut and NASA friends.
This week while Ray and I were in Houston, Todd Hellner from NASA spent hours showing us around Johnson Space Center.

It. Was. Incredible.

We had conversations with astronauts who mere months ago were living on the International Space Station, stepped onto the floor of Mission Control, and sat in the practice shuttle's pilot and captain's seats.Here are the few pictures captured before my camera battery died.

The old Apollo Mission Control room.
This is where Gene Kranz sat during Apollo 13.
This room is no longer operational and is now a Nation Monument.

Down the hall is the current Mission Control room, which we were lucky to get into; an hour later and it would have been closed down in order to prepare for the Shuttle Atlantis, which launched yesterday afternoon.
In the Shuttle!

Did you know that in the Space Station, the craft is moving at such a fast speed that the astronauts experience a sunset or sunrise every 45 minutes? Or, that there is only a 5 minute window every day in which a shuttle can launch and reach the station without using up all their fuel? Amazing, yes?!

We are so thankful to our friend Todd for such an incredible experience.

3 comments:

steve said...

And now I'm jealous all over again....Lucky you! How fun!

So, seriously, how many times did you say "Houston, we've got a problem"

Tom Hanks would be so proud!!

Todd said...

Stumbled across your blog via Ray's blog. Glad you guys enjoyed JSC. Apparently we missed Colbert by a day (he was supposedly here on Friday). I delivered the stroller to Jenny in SA over the weekend.

debiachi said...

wow! How cool is that!