Flight Week - Thursday

Hi Barrett Second Grade and Mrs. Golden's Kindergarten! It was fun to see you on the screen at our teleconference. We hope you enjoyed meeting some NASA employees and hearing a little about our experiment. We can hardly wait to get back to Arlington and show you the results. Today we had a special tour at Johnson Space Center. We got to see a space vacuum where the astronauts train. It was so big, we could only see 90 feet of it and another 30 feet is underground. The door to the vacuum is 50 feet tall! We got to go in a smaller version of the vacuum where astronauts had been testing the tiles that cover the shuttle. Next we went to the Mission Control building. We sat at the controls for the Apollo missions, which is now a historical landmark. Then we got to sit in the visitors gallery and see Mission Control in action. They even had an astronaut at the controls of one of the computer terminals. We could see the astronauts working outside the shuttle and live data feed coming from space. Back at Ellington Field, we put on our flight suits for one last time to do the conference with you. Then we had to put them in the laundry and sign them back in. We said thank you to all the Flight Directors, people from the Reduced Gravity Program, and the NES representatives for giving us the opportunity to participate in the program.