The Final Launch
Friday, July 8th, 2011 09:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tourmalineThe final Space Shuttle launch took place around five hours ago, after most of us had spent the day not getting our hopes up due to the prediction of rubbish weather. And also after an unscheduled hold at T-31seconds to verify the beanie cap was retracted properly.
Emotions have been running high, and media and twitter coverage has been near-constant. So many people I follow on Twitter were at the launch, either as media people or at the tweetup. Yesterday, astronauts Mike Massimino and Doug Wheelock were joined by Sesame Street's Elmo:
This morning, Atlantis was looking amazing on the launchpad, but the weather was still at 30% go.
Many current and former astronauts were at KSC to watch the launch, including Bob Crippen, Pilot on STS-1 and commander of three further shuttle missions. As with previous missions, I think everyone was not getting too excited when the weather went Green, because it can so easily turn back Red, but it was Green at the right time, and everything went well and they're now in orbit. Already they're talking about an extra day to the mission, which would mean nominal landing would be Thursday 21st July. For me, that would mean a clash with my Olympics interview would be unlikely.
I guess you've seen the mass news coverage from you favourite news website, and the rest. The Guardian are doing lots of stuff, they have a handy index page here, if you go into several of the articles and read the comments you'll see some from Violetta73, which is me - I set my Guardian account up many years before I started using Tourmaline online. I noticed on the live-update article one of the staff added a comment basically saying it's OK for other people to join in and comment as well. Hee. After I emailed them some links a couple of days ago, they started following me on Twitter. Yesterday, they had a live Q&A with retired astronaut Jeff Hoffman, I asked a question about kids & students learning about space, which he answered soon after I posted it. I was particularly pleased by his opening line :) The Guardian have also produced a Datablog of NASA astronauts which I've commented on, I'm not linking it directly here because the comment was about how half-arsed the data gathering appears to be.
It is sad that this is the final shuttle mission, but it's a shuttle mission nevertheless, and we should enjoy it like all the other shuttle missions. Wikipedia tends to be a good source of info on the mission, and if you're watching NASA TV, look out for Shannon Lucid on Capcom duties - she joined NASA as part of the 1978 Astronaut Class, the first class trained with the Space Shuttle in mind, and has been with NASA and the Space Shuttle constantly ever since.
Emotions have been running high, and media and twitter coverage has been near-constant. So many people I follow on Twitter were at the launch, either as media people or at the tweetup. Yesterday, astronauts Mike Massimino and Doug Wheelock were joined by Sesame Street's Elmo:
This morning, Atlantis was looking amazing on the launchpad, but the weather was still at 30% go.
Many current and former astronauts were at KSC to watch the launch, including Bob Crippen, Pilot on STS-1 and commander of three further shuttle missions. As with previous missions, I think everyone was not getting too excited when the weather went Green, because it can so easily turn back Red, but it was Green at the right time, and everything went well and they're now in orbit. Already they're talking about an extra day to the mission, which would mean nominal landing would be Thursday 21st July. For me, that would mean a clash with my Olympics interview would be unlikely.
I guess you've seen the mass news coverage from you favourite news website, and the rest. The Guardian are doing lots of stuff, they have a handy index page here, if you go into several of the articles and read the comments you'll see some from Violetta73, which is me - I set my Guardian account up many years before I started using Tourmaline online. I noticed on the live-update article one of the staff added a comment basically saying it's OK for other people to join in and comment as well. Hee. After I emailed them some links a couple of days ago, they started following me on Twitter. Yesterday, they had a live Q&A with retired astronaut Jeff Hoffman, I asked a question about kids & students learning about space, which he answered soon after I posted it. I was particularly pleased by his opening line :) The Guardian have also produced a Datablog of NASA astronauts which I've commented on, I'm not linking it directly here because the comment was about how half-arsed the data gathering appears to be.
It is sad that this is the final shuttle mission, but it's a shuttle mission nevertheless, and we should enjoy it like all the other shuttle missions. Wikipedia tends to be a good source of info on the mission, and if you're watching NASA TV, look out for Shannon Lucid on Capcom duties - she joined NASA as part of the 1978 Astronaut Class, the first class trained with the Space Shuttle in mind, and has been with NASA and the Space Shuttle constantly ever since.
