Jan
14
Space-Nomading across the USA
Apologies for the radio-silence. I’ve been trying to work out where this little #SpaceNomad should go next.
The good news is that there is now a targeted launch date for STS-133, the final mission for space shuttle Discovery, or “Diva Discovery” as some of us have taken to calling her. She’s set to fly on February 24th, all being well.
As you may recall, I got selected for the NASA Tweet-Up for the launch and excitedly packed myself off to Florida, at the end of October 2010. It’s now mid-January 2011 and I’m still here. Well, when I say “here”, I mean the US. I’m actually in Portland, Oregon now, not Florida.
Today’s news is that I’ve been selected for the NASA Tweet-Up at Ames in Mountain View, California on February 11th. It’ll be my first chance to go behind the scenes at Ames, despite having been there twice before. Being a foreigner, and worse, a journalist(!), makes it somewhat difficult to visit NASA bases it seems.
At the Tweet-up we’ll get to learn about the Kepler spacecraft (which looks for undiscovered planets) and NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) aircraft. I don’t know too much about either, yet, but I’m looking forward to finding out a whole host of things and sharing it with you.
I guess this is a good moment to re-cap on the Space Nomad journey so far – I will get round to writing up detailed posts soon, I promise. Just as soon as exciting stuff stops happening!
