posted 05-14-2006 05:17 PM               

I told the little girl in Kansas the story about the signed book. I told her how you were going to get to meet them and how you were going to try to get Harrison to sign some books. She thought the inscription and personalizations were great. Thanks for thinking about us and I will let you know when the book has arrived.

posted 05-14-2006 08:50 PM               

I had a feeling it wasn't going to be the usual "Here's some NASA home movies on our flights." Nevertheless, I was completely unprepared for Schmitt discussing - somewhat in-depth - what the Apollo astronauts brought back in terms of rock samples and how studies of that were used in determining how the moon was formed (e.g., was it a captured body or did an asteroid hit the Earth and was later ejected?)

Science is not my forte. Earth science I can handle, chemistry barely. Forget physics (and the related math, like calculus, but that's neither here nor there.) I felt like we had sat through a one-hour 400-level college course on the moon's geology. Interesting, but obtuse. The only thing I'm sure of is that KREEP has nothing to do with Watergate (The Committee to RE-Elect the President...) and the moon is not made of green cheese. ("No, it's made of American cheese," sayeth Bill Anders.)

Wetherbee talked about risk management, and at least this I was able to follow, since he sprinkled in anecdotes as examples.

Some highlights off the top of my head from both talks:

Wetherbee taking a picture of Schmitt, jokingly saying that it was his payback after 20 years of people taking a picture of him. "Only 20 years... rookie?" Schmitt shot back, joking with Wetherbee.

(I tried getting a shot of the both of them together at the end of Schmitt's talk, but both were busy futzing with their computers.)

Schmitt being addressed at "Senator Schmitt." While this is true, and I'm all for using people's titles as a sign of respect, Schmitt hasn't been a senator in 30 years. "Doctor Schmitt," maybe.

Wetherbee noting that he had two of the longest touchdowns since he hated to use the Shuttle's brakes.

Wetherbee keeping personal track of his mistakes in the simulator, which would have led to the death of him and his crew if it were an actual emergency. What struck me, though, amongst the NASAese, was notations of Gander and Cherry Point as abort sites. Gander International Airport is in Newfoundland and Cherry Point is in North Carolina; they make sense as abort sites since the space station is in a high-inclination orbit, but I wasn't aware that shuttles had East Coast abort options (unless they were not ascent abort sites.)

There's an alternate STS-32R logo, showing the shuttle, looking scared, with a baseball glove, about to retrieve LDEF, which has a scowling tomato leering at the shuttle. I showed it to Wetherbee, who guessed Marsha Ivins must have done since she was the artistic one in the crew. He described the media frenzy that erupted after students had eaten tomatoes whose seeds had been exposed to cosmic radiation after six years. I told him that I would think eating the tomatoes would have been part of the data collection, and frankly, the astronauts were subjected to seven million pounds of thrust at liftoff which IMHO were more of a danger than a student eating a cosmic tomato.

It was a coincidence that he was aboard STS-86, which carried SEEDS II (SEEDS being carried aboard 32R), since he didn't know about the payload.