The longer you work at NASA, the more souvenirs you gather. There are mission patches and mission stickers, pins and commemorative coins, certificates commemorating all kinds of stuff, and more. But when I made it official that I was leaving my old group for my new job, there was only one thing I really wanted as a souvenir of the first 9 years of my career: a traditional “going away” photo signed by all the people in my old division.
My old group lead brought me this special delivery last week and I immediately put it up in my new office. The photo is one of my favorite ever, a lovely image of the shuttle taken from the space station right at sunset. The nose is pointing down towards the earth, with a thin blue layer of atmosphere above. It was taken shortly after the shuttle performed its Ti burn — so in other words, it’s a picture of the shuttle smack dab in the middle of a rendezvous. Highly appropriate, given that I was a Rendezvous Officer. And so many people signed it, and said so many nice things about my years in Flight Dynamics.
Maybe this is a weird thing to blog about, but hey, I like my photo. It makes me happy. So there you go.
