February 2010 Archives
It's been a rough week. There were plenty of bright spots, like our dinner with Meryl and James last Saturday, birthday dinner for Becca on Tuesday, lots of Olympics on TV, and getting paid for all the work I've done on a website. But other events have left me feeling frustrated, beaten down, and tired. I will spare you the details, mainly because this blog is not an appropriate place for the details, but suffice it to say that I am VERY glad that Friday has arrived.
Instead, here are some photos I took last month when I went to California for a day. The weather was brilliantly sunny on the return leg from Ontario, CA to Phoenix, and I had a lot of fun taking photos out the window.
It's always interesting to see the land use patterns in the desert. The contrast of bright green and surrounding tan and brown is striking, especially when it's as bright and sunny as it was that day.
When we flew over this cloud, and the view was really strange! You could see the blurry shadow of our airplane, surrounded by a halo. No tricks -- this photo captures exactly what it looked like. I'd never seen this phenomenon before.
As we neared Phoenix, I noticed we were basically paralleling I-10! I watched the tiny cars move along for quite a while.
Hello, Phoenix. I enjoyed my half hour in your airport.
So a couple weeks ago when we were in Florida...
After watching the most excellent launch of STS-130, we all drove back to our hotel in Orlando and took nice long naps. My parents and brother headed back to Charlotte that afternoon, but Jose and I stuck around for one more night, which gave us time to head over to the KSC Visitor's Center.
Unfortunately for JSC, the KSC Visitor's Center really runs circles around Space Center Houston. It feels more modern, more welcoming, and much larger right from the start. You walk through the main gate and are met with this huge NASA meatball, so of course we had to take a photo. (The "meatball" is NASA's nickname for the agency logo. Even that article I just linked to doesn't explain why, other than to say that it's round. Like a meatball. Shrug.)
Next I took a picture of Jose in front of this Orion mockup. Of course Orion is the vehicle that was just cancelled. Another shrug.
We walked past this shuttle mockup on our way to the Space Shuttle Launch Experience. This is a fairly new attraction, and is a ride that gives you a feeling of what it might be like to launch on the shuttle, complete with shaking, smoke, and the roar of engines. It was actually very well done, and I was really impressed. The ride presented a lot of solid technical information, but in a way that made it accessible and understandable to the general public (which, after all, is the point of a visitor's center). They had lots of video interviews with former astronauts describing the entire launch process, and I was very amused to see that the astronaut who did the bulk of the narrating for the ride was Charlie Bolden. Who is now the NASA Administrator!
After the ride, we walked around the Rocket Garden, which included the gantry that the Apollo 11 astronauts walked across on their way into the capsule!
Jose stopped to admire this F-1 engine. There were five of these babies on the first stage of the Saturn V rocket that took men to the moon. Seeing Jose stand next to it really shows how big they were!
We also hopped in a Gemini capsule mockup, which gave me a newfound respect for the early astronauts. Let's just say I would NOT be first in line to spend two weeks in one of those. Talk about cramped...
Next we walked over to the early space exploration area. One of my favorite things there was the flown Gemini 9 capsule, which was down on the ground so that you could walk all the way around. I particularly love seeing the heat shields on these old vehicles, and imagining all the craziness that went on during the heat of reentry.
After our trip to the visitor's center, we used our badges to drive into KSC. The sun was setting so we had to hurry, but we made a quick stop at the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). This is where they attach the orbiter to the external tank and solid rocket boosters before flight. Then it rolls from here down the 3-mile road to the launch pad. This picture really doesn't convey how immense the VAB really is. It's the fourth-largest building in the WORLD by volume. Each of the stars in the flag painted on the side is 6 feet wide. Yes. It's big.
We drove out to Launch Pad 39A, the site from which Endeavour departed so spectacularly only 14 hours earlier. We had to stop at the gate, but it was still cool.
The sun was setting rapidly, but we also made a quick stop at the press site across the street from the VAB. If you've ever watched a launch on TV, you probably recognize this view of the big clock and flagpole. It was counting up. 14 hours, 25 minutes, and 15 seconds had passed since STS-130's launch!
We also drove past the Shuttle Landing Facility (aka the big runway), but it was almost completely dark by the time we got there, so there was little to see.
We hit the road back to our hotel in Orlando, and the next day we started the two day drive home. The only incident was that I left my toiletry bag in our hotel in Mobile, Alabama. It's been more than 2 weeks, and I've yet to get it returned. I don't care so much about the bag itself and the shampoo and crap in it, but my glasses were in there! I'm hoping it turns up this week, because I really don't want to have to buy a new pair of glasses. My eyes suck, and thus my glasses are not cheap. They say they have it, and each time I've called they say "oh, I'm sorry, we'll go mail it today." But I've heard that 3 times now.
All in all, it was a great trip. Going to see the launch was 110% worthwhile, and although I'm not planning to undertake another drive like that anytime soon, I'm so glad we did it.
On Triathlons and Training:
I had a great 4 mile run last night as the sun was setting. My training is picking up this week as I prepare for the Lonestar Half Ironman at the end of April. I'm about a month late in adding swimming and biking to the mix, but it's now or never. I've struggled quite a bit with training over the past year and a half. At first it was understandable, since I was swamped with wedding planning and house buying. But now it's more confusing. My motivation is...uneven. I find myself spending a lot of time comparing myself to others instead of concentrating on myself and what I want to accomplish.
I don't have a good group to train with. Many of the people in my triathlon club have gotten more serious about the sport than I am interested in becoming, rising as early as 3:30 a.m. to participate in 4-hour long spin classes. I am not at a point in my life where I am interested in getting up that early or spinning that long. This means that I am back to training by myself. Sometimes I don't mind training alone, but sometimes it gets lonely.
On Social Media:
The NASA tweetup last week was great, and I loved participating in it, but after tweeting for a solid 2 days and following dozens of new people on Twitter, I found myself feeling overwhelmed by the amount of social media I was trying to keep up with. When I'm feeling stressed out because I missed the last hour of tweets, something is seriously wrong. So I unplugged from Twitter and Facebook for the whole weekend. A couple times while we were watching the Olympics, working on the bonus room, or enjoying dinner with friends, I thought "oh, I should post this or that." Then I shook my head and groaned at myself.
Yesterday, I unfollowed about 50 people on Twitter whose updates I realized I had begun skimming past anyway. Then I logged onto Facebook and hid a whole slew of people. If the answer to the question "have I communicated in any way with you since high school graduation" was "no" then bye-bye. You can be my Facebook friend, but I do not have to read your updates. Unfollowing and hiding people probably sounds like an insanely obvious thing to do to some of you, but it was long overdue in my life. I feel less overwhelmed already!
(And don't worry -- if you're reading this blog at all, that pretty much guarantees that you are not on either of the lists above.)
On Major Life Decisions:
It's three weeks later and I still don't know anything about what NASA's new direction means for me. Overall, people are worried, scared and unhappy, and listening to the din is stressing me out. For the moment, I've tried to tune out most of the commentary and opinion and just read what's officially released by the people at headquarters. I'm planning to stick around through the end of the shuttle program this fall, since I'm the lead Rendezvous for the last shuttle flight, STS-133. After that? Who knows.
I have many ideas of what I could do. Jose has many ideas of what he could do. A lot of those ideas are compatible. The sticking point is that it will be nearly impossible for us to move into new careers without taking a very large pay cut. That isn't the end of the world, and though it would change our lifestyle, if we must do it, we'll do it. But I feel like we just got settled. The NASA uncertainty makes me feel unsettled. And I like settled better.
My last dentist appointment was scheduled for the week after Hurricane Ike plowed through this area, and the appointment never happened because the dentist's office flooded. They moved, but I never rescheduled, etc etc etc, and that's why suddenly two years had passed since my last visit to the dentist. I walked in this morning with no small amount of trepidation. Prior to the past couple years, I was very diligent about going in every 6 months, but after two years, surely they would have to scrape -- and scrape and scrape -- my teeth raw to remove all the plaque and tartar. NOT. FUN.
If my fears had been realized, I would have never dedicated a blog post to something as boring as the dentist. However, much to my surprise, my trip to the dentist this morning turned out to be quite the revelation. I was fascinated by two things in particular.
First, of course I had lots of tartar on my teeth, as I expected. But my dentist now has some kind of crazy ultrasonic pick thingy that acts like a tiny hammer (at least that's how the hygienist described it) and knocks/vibrates all the tartar off your teeth. Which means basically NO scraping. Which means basically no pain or discomfort. Which means it's about 1000 times less unpleasant. Which is awesome.
Second, they told me that a couple areas where my gums have receded are NOT because I brush too hard, in a reversal of what a dentist told me years ago. For years, I've thought it was my fault, and despite brushing carefully and softly, the couple spots still got worse. Today they told me it's because of my bite! There are two spots where my bottom teeth go over my top teeth, and one spot where my teeth meet edge on, and that produces a lot of pressure, to which my gums are just reacting.
(Despite 4+ years of braces from about ages 11-15, my teeth have continued to shift over the years. The hygienist said they don't tend to put braces on people as young as they used to. Sorry Mom & Dad. Though my teeth are still way straighter than they were before.)
So a couple teeth with a receding gum line? Not my fault! No more guilt complex about how brushing my teeth was somehow actually hurting them! This is big news.
Anyway, that's way more than you probably wanted to hear about 1) the dentist or 2) my gums. So I will end this "ode to my newfound love for my dentist" here and you can all carry on with your days.
I've enjoyed my past few blogs posts about cooking, so I figured I'd just continue with the occasional cooking post -- plus it's fun to take pictures along the way. One of the biggest advantages of cooking at home is that it's a lot easier to control what I eat, and by that I mean both portion size and what goes into the food. We're not that picky, and we don't make huge efforts to make our meals especially low fat or low calorie, but we do try to use more fresh ingredients than we have in the past. (There was nowhere to go but up, considering a lot of our meals used to come out of a box or from a restaurant.)
And then of course there is portion size. I've been moderately overweight for my entire adult life, despite the fact that I lead a fairly active lifestyle. To put it simply: I eat too much. I snack too much, I usually clean my plate, etc etc. So when it comes to losing weight, the biggest thing I have to do is control how much food goes into my mouth. I don't try too hard to count calories (an activity that I hate), and I don't deny myself treats. I just have to EAT LESS. It is FAR easier for me to eat less when I can control how much I put on my plate, and the easiest place to do that is at home.
Hence: more cooking at home, and more lunches brought from home. I've lost 6 pounds over the past 4 months, and while I realize that rate of weight loss is quite slow, it's something.
Anyway, the other night we made seafood risotto, one of my favorite things we've made from this cookbook. "Quick and easy" definitely describes this dish, but it's also quite tasty. It's got a lot of flavor, which makes it satisfying.
To start, you chop up some onions and cook them with some olive oil. Here's Jose helpfully demonstrating his technique. ;)
It's funny how many of the recipes we make these days begin with sauteed onions. I don't care though, because onions on the stovetop smell really good. I usually throw in more onions than the recipe actually calls for too.
Then comes the "risotto" part. Because this is a recipe from a "quick and easy" cookbook, it doesn't actually use true risotto. It uses regular white long grain rice. That goes in with the onions, along with a can of chicken broth. That simmers, covered, until the rice starts to get fluffy.
By that time, most of the chicken broth has been absorbed, so you add a little water along with some julienned (look at me using cooking terminology!) carrots and black pepper. More simmering, again covered.
After the rice is fully cooked, the rest is super easy. Add chunks of crab meat (we get the imitation stuff, which is fine), parmesan cheese, and spinach, and leave it on the stove just long enough for the crab to heat up and the spinach to wilt.
Voila! It reheats pretty well as a leftover too.
Book club this month was at my house. This turned out to be the perfect incentive for us to finish up a couple lingering projects and give the main living area (family room/kitchen/dining room) a much-needed decluttering. Although I'm not sure it counts as decluttering if you just move all the stuff to another room... Still, the main living area looks awesome. Hopefully we can do a good job of keeping it that way.
I posted a couple days ago about how we finally painted the breakfast room. That was definitely motivated by knowing all the girls would be hanging out there for wine and snacks.
Another thing that has been on our list for quite some time is some kind of artwork for the large wall in our family room. Though we may replace the Ikea TV stand, we don't have plans to get a giant entertainment center anytime soon, so the TV sits pretty low. This wouldn't be as odd-looking in a lot of homes, but our ceilings in there are 12 feet tall. The large, emtpy wall was begging for something fairly big.
We've come up with a lot of ideas over the past 6 months. The first was to simply buy a large piece of art, but after extensive browsing at the Art Festival last fall, we quickly discovered that option would cost $1000 at minimum. So we started thinking of ideas for art we could make ourselves. I thought about a photo collage. I also thought about framing fabric, paper, or wallpaper. But then a couple weeks ago, Jose happened to be surfing hubblesite.org. I knew they had high-resolution images available for download and public use, since all the Hubble images qualify as public domain. What I didn't realize is that they also had one image, an awesome photo of the Carina Nebula, available in MURAL size.
They offered the download in either one large 40" x 80" file, or in 8 20" x 20" squares meant for hanging together. We used painter's tape to mask out the area on our wall, and the full 40x80 size just looked too much like a billboard to me. "Let's make it the same length, but not quite as tall," I suggested, "and just hang 4 vertical panels."
I downloaded the single image file, used Photoshop to crop 5 inches off the top and 5 inches off the bottom, and divided it into four 20" x 30" panels. I sent the files off to mpix.com, who I've used occasionally in the past for high quality prints. A few days later, they arrived and I stopped by the frame shop for some nice, thin wooden frames. And voila!
All in all, I guess it's pretty geeky that we now have a huge astrophoto on our living room wall. But hey, that's who we are.
This weekend we're going to try to continue the progress with some work in the bonus room upstairs...
Yesterday I got to officially use Twitter for work! I was one of 13 NASA Ambassadors for a NASA Tweetup (#nasatweetup) held at JSC. If you're not a Twitter user, this may not make much sense, so here's the quick explanation: space enthusiasts active on Twitter were invited to submit their name for one of 100 spots available to come to JSC, meet some astronauts, and take a tour of some of the coolest facilities here in Houston. The visitors, or "Space Tweeps," came from all over -- various places across the US as well as Canada, Mexico, and even Brazil! They paid their own way, but in return NASA provided them with a day full of awesome tours and activities and "insider access" to JSC.
I've been active on Twitter for a while, and often use it to share some of the fun things I get to do in my job, so JSC Public Affairs asked me and 12 others like me to serve as "NASA Ambassadors" for the event. We got to participate throughout the day, chatting with the visitors and answering lots of questions about what we do. I only took a few crappy iPhone pictures, but hopefully those will give you a sense of what went on!
The group began their day at Space Center Houston (@SpaceCenterHou), where they were welcomed and got to participate in a live Twitter session with astronaut Cady Coleman (@Astro_Cady) who was on travel but set aside a half hour to take virtual questions.
After a short welcome, the day's events got underway with a Q&A session with astronaut Bobby Satcher (@Astro_Bones or @ZeroG_MD). He was a Mission Specialist on STS-129, so he began with an extended highlight video of that flight narrated by the whole crew. I didn't go to the 129 crew's debrief, so I had never seen the video, and it was a lot of fun to watch it after serving as their lead Rendezvous Officer.
Afterwards, he signed some autographs for the visitors, and then everyone was free to explore Space Center Houston and have some lunch. At that point I headed back to the office for a few hours while everyone went on tours of both the Neutral Buoyancy Lab (NBL, aka the big pool where the astronauts train for spacewalks) and the shuttle and space station training mockups.
I rejoined the group when they arrived to see Mission Control. The Tweetup organizers planned things perfectly so that all the visitors were in the shuttle viewing room when the shuttle crew got their wakeup call. I think they all got a kick out of that, and it was good that there was some action to watch -- because honestly, watching people sit at their consoles gets old kind of quick. ;)
The next stop was the historic Apollo control center, which is always a highlight for any visitor.
From there, they went directly downstairs to the ISS viewing room, and were able to stay there and listen to President Obama's call to the STS-130 and ISS crew. That was completely a freebie -- I don't think even PAO knew that Obama would be calling the crew until yesterday. I guess when you're the President, you can talk to space pretty much whenever you want. ;)
All in all, it was a really fun day. I love sharing NASA with visitors, and this kind of thing always makes me feel refreshed and reinspired about my own job. Even with all the uncertainty about NASA's future that's been swirling around since the budget announcement on February 1, NASA is still a great place to be.
Jose was sick when we headed to Florida last weekend, so it was really only a matter of time before I caught it too. Sure enough, my throat started to hurt on Thursday, and I woke up Friday morning feeling like a train had run over me in the night. I stayed home from work, which in effect gave me a four-day weekend since we were off yesterday for President's Day. That would've been great, except each morning I woke up feeling like crud. Fortunately, each day I also felt progressively better as the day went on, so the weekend wasn't a total loss.
Jen, Becca, Rich, Jen and Gavin get into the Olympic spirit (Whistler, 2005)
It was a lazy, lazy four-day weekend. I spent Friday moaning and groaning around the house before watching the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics that night. After that, the TV was on pretty much constantly as I watched just about all of the Olympics I possibly could. I love the Olympics. Love them. I'm even a total sucker for all the "feel-good" stories that NBC puts together. Can't help it. LOVE.
I'm a silver medalist! (Whistler, 2005)
My friends and I visited Vancouver and Whistler in 2005 for a ski trip. They had been awarded the games already, so Whistler had a little area already set up in the village with a few random items, like a medal stand with fake paper medals, a bobsled, and hula hoops in the colors of the Olympic rings. I dug up the photos to remember, and they make me laugh. The little kid in bronze medal position was a total stranger, but he really makes this photo, I think. :)
It wasn't until yesterday that I finally pulled my butt off the couch and actually did something productive with the four-day weekend. (Aside from cooking, that is. I did a lot of cooking over the weekend. Which is great, but dang, I felt like I was also washing dishes the whole weekend. Which is less fun.)
Our breakfast room has featured a number of paint splotches for...well, for quite some time. (These are best seen in this photo of Jose's cousin dancing in our kitchen -- which was taken in AUGUST. Yes, 6 months ago.)
Yesterday we finally finished the breakfast room painting! And there was much rejoicing! It still needs to be carried into the kitchen above the cabinets, which I will hopefully take care of next weekend, but at least it looks mostly finished for now.
Halfway through, I was really regretting the decision to paint the kitchen at all. There were SO many windows and doors to paint around, not to mention the odd angles of the ceiling. But now that it's done, I think it looks great. When we built the house, we purposefully chose tile and countertops that were very neutral, since that's the stuff that's harder and more expensive to change. But paint? Paint is cheap. Paint is (relatively) easy. Resale value be damned, I wanted something colorful!
Jose picked the gray for the dining room, and I picked this deep turquoise for the kitchen. The good news? We both like the other's choice. We've got a lot of painting still to do in the house at some point, but who knows when that will happen. Next on the list is the bonus room. Once its painted, we can actually put together all the bookshelves we bought last month!
Happy Valentine's Day to you all, but especially to my wonderful husband. This is our fifth Valentine's Day together, but first as husband and wife. That is pretty cool.
I've never been one to really get into this holiday, so we keep it simple. We bought a bouquet of white hydrangea from HEB yesterday as we finished up our grocery shopping. Hydrangeas were in both my bouquet and the centerpieces at our wedding, and I love them, especially in crisp, clean white. They are so pretty.
Tonight we're making dinner at home, and I'm making dessert. Yum!
Here are my photos of the STS-130 launch early Monday morning. For those interested, I had my camera on a tripod and used my 70-200mm lens, fully zoomed of course. I framed the image prior to launch, and set the camera to f/8 and 1/125 based on the advice of this site. Sure, the launch was in the middle of the night, but it's also bright. Very, very bright.
The launch pad lit up a few hours before launch
I also had my remote, which let me take pictures without viewing the launch through a viewfinder. I got to watch with my own eyes and still get a few photos. In retrospect, it would have been cool to try a long-exposure, but I wasn't entirely confident I'd get the settings right, so I decided to go for single shots.
For those not familiar with all the details of a shuttle launch, this photo shows the moment of main engine ignition. The shuttle's three main engines (the ones on the back of the orbiter) are actually lit 6 seconds before launch. Mission Control has 6 seconds to make sure they're functioning properly, before...
...the solid rocket boosters light. The exhaust from the main engines (which is actually just steam, since the gas is just oxygen and hydrogen) billowed up between the orbiter and those of us on the causeway, which led to a cool silhouette of exhaust that the shuttle rose out of. When the solid rocket boosters light, there is no doubt -- that thing is GOING somewhere, and fast.
It's the solids that are so bright, and they light up the entire sky.
As soon as it clears the launch tower, the entire shuttle stack rolls on its vertical axis to better orient itself for the climb to orbit. This is what the "Houston, roll program" call that you hear from the astronauts means.
The shuttle is really zippy. It jumps off the launch pad like it's been shot out of a cannon, and well, it kinda HAS. A launch is nothing more than a carefully controlled explosion.
After the solid rocket boosters separated two minutes into flight, we were able to see Endeavour's main engines moving through the sky like a star. I think we would have been able to watch them through main engine cut-off at 8.5 minutes, except she went flying over the horizon and out of view.
By the time the crew performed the burn that truly puts them in orbit a half hour later, we were already in the car on our way back to Orlando. I watched the rendezvous from my laptop in an Alabama hotel room.
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 times, 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!
