Photo from Mom's camera (forgot to bring my card reader to FL, so my pics will be later)
At 4:14 a.m. this morning, STS-130 launched on its mission to the International Space Station. And we were watching from the causeway! The second time was the charm, and the weather was obviously more clear last night. We spent the pre-launch hours snug in the car, where it was warmer. There weren't nearly as many people as the night before, and although I still don't totally understand the massive decrease in crowds, I'll chalk it up to a combination of it being a "schoolnight", plus the Super Bowl, plus people not wanting to spend another 4 hours waiting in the cold.
The launch was spectacular. This was the third that I've seen, but the first two were in 1997 and 1998 so it had been quite a while. I'm so glad I was able to see this one with Jose, my parents, and my brother. That made it extra special.
It is difficult to describe what viewing a launch is really like, especially a night launch. I can say things like "it was as bright as the sun" and "the sound crackles and pops and creaks," but that doesn't do it justice. Even the pictures don't do it justice. You really just need to be there yourself, see the light, hear and feel the sound.
So instead of continuing in a futile attempt to describe what seeing a space shuttle launch is like, I will simply encourage any and all of you who are able to make your way to Florida for one of the last four shuttle flights, currently scheduled for March, May, July, and September. It is a trip that is well worth your time.
We left at 3:45 on Friday, stopped in Spanish Fort, Alabama for the night, and arrived in Orlando at 8:15 last night. After a few hours of chilling out with my parents and brother David, who drove down from North Carolina, we headed to KSC. We met my brother, his girlfriend, and her son, who drove up from Miami, just after midnight at the Astronaut Hall of Fame. Packed into two cars with two car passes, we scooted on site and by 12:45 we were parked on the causeway.
The view from the causeway was actually far BETTER than I expected. The launch pad was perfectly aligned with our viewing spot, and the orbiter was in full view. You could easily make out the shape of the orbiter on the stack with your eyes, even though it was more than 6 miles away, and the view through binoculars was awesome.
I was feeling really good about things, but alas, clouds moved in towards the end and scrubbed the launch. Traffic moved quickly off the first part of the causeway, and I optimistically thought we'd beat the rush. But it slowed to a crawl, then a dead stop, and it took 2.5 hours to get back to our hotel next to the Orlando airport. At that point, we all crashed for some much-needed sleep.
I found the scrub far more disappointing this time than other time, perhaps because this time we drove 16 hours to see it. Although I know it's completely irrational, I also feel like it's somehow my fault, because my family drove all the way here and they didn't see it! And Brian and Cindy and Danny were only able to come last night. They drove up from Miami and got little sleep all to see a launch scrub. :(
The five of us will be back again tonight/tomorrow morning. I'm crossing my fingers that it goes this time!
STS-129 Launch last November. Only 5 more to go.
As I mentioned yesterday, it has been an...interesting...week here at NASA. President Obama's proposed 2011 budget, introduced Monday, effectively instructed NASA to make an almost 180-degree turn from what it has been doing for the past 6 years...and you could make an argument that it represents a complete shift from what NASA has done for its entire existence.
First of all, a thought that has nothing to do with the change in direction, but with how it was announced. With the budget. No separate announcement championing shifting priorities in the United States' spaceflight program; it was just thrown in with the federal budget. And from what I can tell, the high-level powers-that-be at NASA had little-to-no warning of the all of the major changes that budget proposal would entail. This means that they had no time to prepare, which means they have no idea how to answer all of the questions being asked of them by the thousands of NASA employees and contractors. If you need an example of how NOT to announce a major policy shift, this might be it.
So here's are the three big highlights of the new budget promises, taken straight from the overview put together by NASA management, followed by my reactions, in order:
Top line increase of $6.0 billion over 5-years (FY 2011-15) compared to the FY 2010 Budget, for a total of $100 billion over five years.
Really? Well that's great! More money is what we need! More money is what the Augustine Commission said NASA would need in order to successfully complete our new vehicle and rocket within a reasonable time period. Since the Constellation program was announced in 2004, with the intention of building a new space transportation system to carry American astronauts to the space station and beyond, the budget police have consistently stripped more and more money from the program, leading to delays and a decrease in both the technology used on the new vehicle and its performance capability. More money is great!
"Significant and sustained investment" in:
Hmm. Ok...this seems pretty nebulous to me, but it all sounds good enough. I wonder what destinations are included in the robotic precursor missions? It'd be cool to go to an asteroid or something. And I'm glad to see that the ISS will be extended, since it'd really be a shame to abandon it in just a few years.
Cancellation of the Constellation program; and $600 million in FY 2011 to ensure the safe retirement of the Space Shuttle upon completion of the current manifest.
Wait. What? WHAT?!? Cancellation of the Constellation program? The whole thing? As in, no more new rocket, no more new spaceship? But what are we replacing it with? Will we build another vehicle? No? We're just going to do all those nebulous, undefined things in the list above? And NASA will no longer have a vehicle of its own? But that's...that's...well, that's something NASA has never done before. We have never not had either 1) our own vehicle flying or 2) the next vehicle in development. That feels like a punch in the stomach. Do we even care about exploring space anymore?
"Most important, we are not ending our ambitions to explore space. In order to explore new frontiers, we are launching a vigorous new technology development and test program that will pursue game-changing technology development that can take us further and faster and more affordably into space."
But that's just a bunch of political speak and cool-sounding words! Game-changing? Technology development? To me, this translates as "we have no clue what we're going to do, but we'll do something and call it game-changing."
And so three days after the budget was introduced, morale at NASA has reached a new low. Many of my coworkers and friends are contractors, and will likely either lose their job or, at a minimum, need to relocate. Jose and I are both very lucky to be civil servants, and therefore cannot be laid off without an act of Congress, and yet our jobs have just completely changed. Jose's entire job was working on the Orion vehicle being developed. But it is being developed no more. My job is to be a flight controller for the space shuttle and help develop operations concepts for Orion. The space shuttle only has 5 flights remaining before its retirement, and Orion, as previously mentioned, is dead in the water.
Despite the obvious career and life implications for myself, my husband, my friends, and my coworkers, here's the thing: I'm not opposed to NASA providing financial and technical incentive to commercial space companies to independently develop new human-rated vehicles, in fact, I believe it's in NASA's best interest to help develop commercial space technology. At the moment, spaceflight is extremely expensive and there is little profit to be had; commercial entities are unlikely to push to develop human spaceflight capability without government assistance.
And, surprisingly, I'm not actually opposed to the cancellation of Constellation. It was a program that had many flaws, and while I do believe that we would have successfully developed a new vehicle to carry our astronauts into orbit, if the decision is that we are better off starting over, I accept that and even somewhat agree with it.
What I'm vehemently opposed to is the apparent complete lack of vision on the part of the administration with this proposal. While this is not "the end of human spaceflight," as I've heard many moan, it does feel like the end of NASA as we have known it -- in some ways good, but in others very bad. I've been saying for a while that NASA needs an overhaul, but this proposal only goes halfway. It shakes things up, but has no idea where they could or SHOULD land. It cancels the Constellation program, our future vehicle, and replaces it with....what? Because I don't see an answer to that question. We are continuing the progression of Americans in space from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo to Space Shuttle to Space Station to...nothing. To NOTHING.
NASA, and JSC in particular, has 50 years of experience flying and operating MANNED space vehicles. There are plenty of other entities that have operated robots and satellites, but there is no one else in the country -- heck, no one else in the entire western hemisphere! -- that has this experience with sending real, live people into space. 50 years. Half a century. With the new direction, we seem to be poised on the brink of losing that, which is a fate I desperately hope to avoid. But I have not yet figured out what a NASA flight controller like me is supposed to do when there are no NASA vehicles to control. Perhaps I'll eventually move on to be an operator for a commercial company. Perhaps NASA will end up operating the commercial vehicles.
But it seems most likely at this moment that when I finish my role as lead Rendezvous Officer for STS-133, the last space shuttle flight, my life in Mission Control will be over.
On Monday morning, President Obama released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2011. Embedded in that budget were changes for NASA, including the termination of the Constellation program begun in 2004. With the space shuttle program coming to an end after the last shuttle flight this fall, the Constellation program was the next big thing: designing a new vehicle to carry astronauts to the space station, and eventually beyond. That program has now been cancelled. By the end of this calendar year, NASA will have gone from three major programs (space shuttle, space station, and Constellation) to one. NASA will not be designing or building anything to replace the space shuttle under the President's proposed plan. Instead, NASA will focus on developing new technologies, while we will rely on commercial companies to develop new ways to take humans into orbit.
This is bad for NASA. Very bad. Career-altering. Life-altering. Many people will lose their jobs, and many people who still have jobs will wonder what they're supposed to be working on. If you had asked me on Friday if I would still be working for NASA in 2 years, I would have said "yes, certainly." On Monday, my answer changed to "I highly doubt it."
I'm still formulating my thoughts and will post them soon. But on Monday night I needed to distract myself. I did that by cooking a lasagna.
I've never cooked a lasagna before, and let's face it -- it's far easier to buy a frozen one from the store. They taste good and involve a lot less work and a lot fewer dishes. But I've been enjoying cooking much more lately, and for some reason I just really wanted to be able to say that I made lasagna. It seems like something that would be hard to make, and I wanted to see if I could do it. (FYI, this was another recipe from The Pioneer Woman's cookbook, but the same recipe, slightly simplified, is also on her website.)
It turns out that it's not difficult to make; it's just time-consuming, i.e. we didn't sit down to eat until 9:00 pm, at which point I was pretty dang hungry. I knew it would need to bake for 45 minutes, but I didn't read closely enough to realize that making the meat sauce also required simmering for 45 minutes. I REALLY need to learn to read the full recipe first, but alas, I didn't.
It was delicious. I love eating something delicious for dinner and knowing that I made it. Totally cool. This recipe made a TON of lasagna, so be warned. Next time I might consider cutting it in half. Fortunately, lasagna stills tastes great as a leftover. We've already enjoyed some for lunch yesterday, and I may be having it again tomorrow!
I complain about this race every year, yet I continue to run it. That's because it's one of the best values around -- for $30, you get to run a race AND you get a ticket to that evening's basketball game. The tickets were actually pretty good too. It's the first time I've ever sat on the lower level for basketball, and it made a big difference.
John, Melissa, Jose and Kelly shivering pre-race
But when John and Kelly went to packet pickup on Saturday (where they kindly picked up our packets as well), they had to wait 45 MINUTES in line. To pick up their race packet. That's just absurd. I can't recall ever having to wait in line more than 5 minutes at any of the hundreds of races I've done...except for this one. And it happens every year. Inexcusable.
Jose & me after the race
And when it was 38 degrees outside on Sunday morning, everyone had to mill around outside because the doors to the Toyota Center were either locked or guarded. No one was allowed inside, where it was warm, before the race. Keep in mind that the race ENDS on the basketball court and people are funneled through the concourse after the race (to the post-race party, which is also outside in the cold). But they can't let people in before the race to keep warm until the start time? Also inexcusable.
And when Jose went to demonstrate the "power pose" he created that morning under the basket, the dude next to him worried warned him not to jump up at the basket. Does he seriously think that Jose can even reach the basket (which maybe he can, but in that case, DANG JOSE, YOU CAN JUMP)? And does he seriously think that even if Jose does reach the basket, that he's going to somehow damage the rim when 6'8" 250+ pound basketball players can dunk on it regularly without it breaking?
Anyway, all stupidity on the Toyota Center's part aside, we had fun and enjoyed our tickets to the game that night. I ran with Jose and am proud of him for doing it -- I don't think he'd run 3 miles since the Rockets Run LAST year. After the race, we all came back to Clear Lake and went to breakfast at The Egg and I. Yum!
While I was at my parents' house in Charlotte for Christmas, I pulled about 10 boxes of old slides down from the dusty shelves of one of the bedroom closets. After taking them all out of the carousels and packing them up snugly in a box, I sent them off to ScanCafe, a company that will scan old photos and slides for you.
Me circa 1979
I was slightly nervous about this, and my parents even more so -- the thought of sending all these slides, some of them as much as 30 years old, into the void was intimidating. But they'd been sitting in boxes, untouched for years. And MAN, I really wanted those photos. And digitizing is even better, since we can all have our own copy.
At my grandparents' (mom's side) mobile home in Myrtle Beach, circa 1979
So off the box went in early January to California, where the company processed the order and sent the slides on to India. INDIA!! Our cherished memories were going halfway around the world, and what if they disappeared??
Mom circa 1979 (cool jacket, Mom!)
But realistically, none of us were ever going to take the time to scan them. And even if I did, the task would probably never be completed. At least not in THIS decade. So they would have likely remained in their boxes up on the top shelf of the closet for another 30 years.
Grandmother (dad's mom) near the barn in Pennsylvania
Yesterday, almost a month after the slides were put into the hands of UPS and ScanCafe, I got an email telling me the scans are online!
Pumpkin Carving with Dad, circa 1979
I get to flip through them all, and mark the ones that I don't want to keep, but who am I kidding, I'm keeping them ALL. Then after finalizing the order, they ship the originals back with the scans on DVD.
The twins, looking surprised
Unfortunately for Katie and Brian, the slides are mostly of me, then David and me. My dad appears to have given up the slide hobby shortly after the twins were born.
David, Brian, Katie, and Me circa 1983
But man, the results are SO AWESOME. I almost broke into tears when I started looking through them -- all these awesome photos, all these memories of my childhood. I'm so, so happy we decided to ship them off for scanning, and I'm so, so happy that we're all going to have these photos to keep. I'll hold final judgment until we have the DVDs in hand, but at the moment this is looking like the best $277 I've ever spent.
I am not a huge fan of pastries. Donuts? Cinnamon buns? Most baklava? Powered sugar-covered anything? Yech. I can't really take it. It's not the dough; it's the sugar. Too much concentrated sugar, too much glaze, too much sweet sticky syrupy stuff.
But here in Texas, we have MEXICAN bakeries. Who sell MEXICAN pastries. And they are oh-so-delicious. No glaze, no syrup, no overwhelming sweetness. Just yumminess. Every time we visit Corpus (or they come here), Jose's mom gets us a big box of stuff from La Michoacana, which is down the road from her house. You can eat most of the items for either breakfast OR dessert.
So when we went to Mi Tierra for lunch last Saturday in San Antonio, I thought that their panaderia (bakery) was pretty much the most awesome thing that I'd seen all week.
The smile on my face is because I'm thinking about all the pastries I'm going to get after I finish my tacos. (Hmm. Perhaps I should have skipped the tacos to have more room for sweet breads. Oh well, too late. The tacos were yummy too.)
And here's the other thing. Mexican pastries are super cheap! When I lived in my old apartment, there was a Mexican bakery down the street and when my mom visited, she'd stop there each morning when she got back from walk. You can get a whole bag of sweet bread and assorted goodies for something like $2.
YUM.
After a day of shopping and eating in San Antonio, we decided we should take in some Texas history before we headed back home. I'm about to admit my ignorance, but oh well: until this weekend, I thought the Alamo was the ONLY mission in the area.
(Picture me ducking as the native Texans throw things at their computers.)
Anyway, it turns out that the Alamo is only one of FIVE missions strung along the San Antonio river, each a couple miles from the next, and together they make up the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. The Alamo is certainly the most famous of these, but of course its fame comes not from its days as an active mission, but rather from about 50 years after the Spanish and Franciscans had "secularized" it, when a small group of Texans took a stand against General Santa Anna. However, the other four missions are arguably much prettier than the Alamo, and they are all home to active Catholic parishes that hold regular services in their churches.
Mission Concepcion
Our first stop was Mission Concepcion, which is only a couple miles south of the Alamo. (The Alamo, if you've never been, is smack dab in the middle of downtown San Antonio, so it's kinda hard to miss!) Mission Concepcion was advertised as the most well-preserved of the missions, having avoided much of the wear-and-tear -- and use as a bullseye for target practice by various armies -- that affected the other missions after they were secularized in the late 1700s and given back to the Indians.
Corridor at Mission Concepcion
Sadly, the church is closed for renovation through March, so we didn't get to view the interior, where there are still remnants of the original frescos. We did enjoy wandering around the grounds though, and the weather was beautiful, but with the church closed, we quickly headed another couple miles down the road to Mission San Jose.
Church at Mission San Jose
Mission San Jose is called the "Queen of the Missions" since it's the largest in the area, and it underwent significant restoration in the 1930s. The park's main visitor center was located just outside the gate, and the entire mission compound including outer walls, gates, church, and granary was there to give a really good idea of what things looked like in the 1700s.
Gate to Mission San Jose
You can see in this photo from the gate that there was a lot of empty space in the middle of the compound. This is where the missionaries and natives would hold classes (both to learn religion and to learn new skills), store their crops, slaughter animals for food, and just hang out. The purpose of the missions wasn't just to convert the natives to Christianity. Instead the Spanish and Franciscans had a clear plan -- convert the natives, yes, but also develop their skills and turn them into productive, tax-paying Spanish citizens.
The natives lived in rooms all along the outer wall of the compound. One of the more interesting things I learned was that most of the natives came to the mission willingly. Many of them were from the Coahuilteco tribe, and were attracted to the mission because it offered a steady supply of food as well as protection from enemy tribes. The Lipan Apache, and later the Comanche, often pushed south from the Great Plains to attack groups in the San Antonio area. The protection offered by the Spanish to weaker tribes if they came into the mission must have been pretty tempting.
Fresco remnants
It must have been a pretty awesome sight to come upon one of the missions in their heyday. We're so used to seeing plain stone churches today that I forgot that the churches were much more colorful when they were built. Frescos covered the entire facade of the church when it was built.
Granary at Mission San Jose
Immediately outside the walls of the mission were the fields where they'd grow all of the crops. When they were harvested, they were brought to this building, the granary, which was located in one corner very close to the church.
Extending from the back of the church was a great series of arches. Originally this was the convento, or "priest's residence", so there were many rooms on two floors.
There was also a courtyard located right off the back of the church and beside the convento where the mission residents could gather before and after church each day.
We had a really nice time wandering around Mission San Jose and I learned a lot. It inspired me to learn more about Texas history; after all, I've lived in Texas for almost 8 years (and that doesn't even count my co-op years) so it's probably time I took some pride in that, right? Right??
Flags outside the Institute of Texan Cultures
There are two other missions farther down the river but we ran out of time on this trip, so we'll save them for next time. Our final stop before hitting the road back to Houston was the Institute of Texan Cultures. When he was a kid, Jose's class took a field trip to San Antonio and they visited this museum. Somehow it really stuck in his mind, because he has mentioned it every time San Antonio comes up in conversation, so of course we had to go.
The museum is divided into sections according to the culture -- and I'm not just talking about the natives, the Spanish, and the French. They also had extensive sections covering pretty much any group of immigrants that ever ended up in Texas, including everyone from Germans (who famously settled in and around Fredericksburg in the hill country) to Swedes to Lebanese. There were so many cultures and so many stories to take in that it was actually overwhelming. We stayed there for about an hour and a half, but it would take days to actually read all of the information.
Here's the entire set of photos from our weekend in San Antonio, for your enjoyment:
Many of you have already heard of The Pioneer Woman, a woman who gave up city life and moved to a ranch in Oklahoma after falling in love with a cowboy. She has a completely fabulous website full of great photography, yummy recipes, funny stories of life on the ranch, and other awesomeness. I came across her blog last summer and have been reading ever since (along with thousands of others, I might add).
I put her recently released cookbook on my Christmas list, and my sister was excellent enough to get it for me. I finally cracked it open last night and started with her infamous linguine with clam sauce. (If you want to know why it's infamous, you can read her story.)
First I read through the whole recipe, which in itself is impressive since I have a rather bad habit of NOT reading the entire recipe before beginning to cook something. (That gets awkward when I realize I'm all out of some key ingredient.) That's how I knew to save the clam juice! And yes, I used canned clams. I used canned and dried ingredients mostly, which is probably not ideal, but hey -- next time I'll go for the fresh stuff.
I thought I could both cook the pasta and make the sauce at the same time, because cooking pasta is just not that hard. But it turns out I'm not so good with the multi-tasking and timing of multiple items in the kitchen quite yet. Fortunately Jose had just gotten home from class, so I gave him the pasta monitoring duties.
Shortly thereafter, it was done! And it was delicious! And look at me, I even got all inspired to take some photos, although mine certainly don't compare to the ones in the book.
I'll definitely make this recipe again, because as yummy as it was, I think it can be even better. First of all: more clams! I didn't specify what size cans I needed when Jose went grocery shopping, so I only had about 2/3 the amount of clams that the recipe called for. Also, as I already mentioned: fresher stuff! I used garlic from a spice jar instead of actually mincing up a fresh clove and I used dried basil because we didn't have the parsley the recipe called for. I don't think this really hurt anything, but it wouldn't hurt to use the fresh stuff -- especially the parsley.
Overall verdict: YUM.
I've got a blog entry brewing in my head about the rest of our San Antonio weekend, and pictures to share. I've also got a blog entry to write about the incredible hotel I stayed in last week in California, as I mentioned earlier. But I have no time to write them. It's only Tuesday, but over the past 48 hours I have been utterly SWAMPED with work and personal obligations. On top of that, my brain seems to have deserted me -- I forgot both my clinic appointment yesterday, which I need to renew my flight physical for the Vomit Comet, and an appointment I had yesterday evening with my freelance client. The clinic incident was rather absurd, given that I had already been to the clinic first thing in the morning to have my blood drawn. How hard is it to remember to go back 4 hours later?! Fortunately they were ok with me arriving 25 minutes late. However, realizing at 7:30 that I had forgotten about my 7:00 appointment left me in a profusely apologetic panic, made worse by the fact that I am already behind on the work I am doing for their website. On top of that, there are at least 5 different items at work that have converged on the next couple weeks, as such projects are wont to do.
SIGH.
Anyway, to tide you over for today, here are 3 random photos taken with my iPhone.
That flag was in the corner of the waiting room at the JSC clinic. I downloaded a new iPhone app, Hipstamatic, after seeing a couple photos using it on Laurie's photostream. It's neat. The iPhone photos are low-res enough that I find that some sort of post-processing often makes them more appealing to me.
Last night's sunset was pretty. I managed to take a few seconds to enjoy it before I went back to my state of frazzled-ness.
Finally, here's a picture of an egret sitting on top of somebody's car in the parking lot across from building 4. Oh, you crazy NASA wildlife...
