good morning from Hunstville!
nothing like some time on the MAT to wake you up in the morning
it's go time! Stepping into Atlantis to be Commander for our Shuttle Mission!
photo from the flight deck! Mission Control may have told me not to tweet and fly the shuttle.
pretty sweet view behind me
spending our free time with my boy. :)
our thermal protection system
testing our thermal protection system
another group testing their thermal protection system
today:
This morning we went to breakfast then right to the astronaut simulators... which at Space Camp means a 1/6 moon gravity chair and the Multi-Axis Trainer. I hopped in the 1/6th chair after one other person on the team had gone, then I ran over to hop into the shuttle landing simulator in the museum in the hope that I wouldn't crash it... I did. A LOT. After the 3rd or 4th try, I started to get the hang of it, and by the end of 30 minutes or so, I was able to land it a few times in a row. I hoped that the simulation supervisors would go easy on me, then I headed back over to the rest of the team. I jumped on the multi axis trainer as did the rest of the team, then it was time for our shuttle mission.
Our team leader let us know there's an award for best mission at the end of the week, and I thought from the way things went on the shuttle we may have had a shot... but I heard things in mission control didn't go so well, so now I'm not so sure. I was much calmer than I expected I would be, but I could tell how crazy things were for other people and in other places, so I thought I did a pretty good job of staying calm, even though some people told me I didn't. Turns out practicing landing wasn't quite as vital as I thought, as I'm pretty sure they had my landing on a really easy setting. It was pretty confusing because the view was not even close to the same and I thought I was going to land in the swamp around the shuttle landing facility at Kennedy rather than on the runway, but I pretty much stuck the landing :) Overall, I thought everything went really really well despite what I heard about other places not quite going as smooth. We solved our anomalies, stayed(ish) on our checklist and landed with everyone on board and the doors closed... so those are all marks of a good mission in my book! The best thing of all though is that I had lots of fun being commander!
After our mission, we debriefed under the space shuttle (you know, normal day at space camp...)We hung around in the gift shop for a little while, and I spent some time watching the vonBraun team interviews. After that, we went over to the teacher resource center (by the way, the one at Marshall is super fancy!) to do a lab on Thermal Protection Systems.
We were a little worried about getting to do everything at Aviation Challenge because there was some serious lightning in the area a few hours before we went out there, but somehow things cleared up and we made it. We zip lined, did the Helicopter Dunk and lifting basket, then we headed back for dinner. I don't think I've ever laughed as hard as I did during dinner tonight. Our team is seriously the best team EVER. Another cool thing about being here is it brought me back in contact with two teachers I met at a NASA Explorer Schools workshop last year, Tami and Cathy, so we got a photo together in our flight suits to send to our NES friends :)
We headed from dinner to a presentation Siemens Solid Edge CAD program, which is really cool and I'm probably going to use it next year with my robotics team.
Lastly, Honeywell had to finish up taking photos, so I and a few others was bussed back to the simulator area for photos. They're doing this cool thing where they're taking pictures of the teachers from the same state/country, and since there are people in the program from 41 states and 27 countries (according to the back of my t-shirt) I took a photo with the 4 other teachers from Florida.
We headed back to the dorm and I spent some time with my seriously awesome roommates, and now it's time to get ready for day 4!
today in tweets:
@SciTeacher_Mike we are during simulations/photos, but we all have them because of honeywell. not sure if that's the case for everyone :)- We've got a little break so I'm spending some time with my boy
@DrVonBraun#HESA pic.twitter.com/j72exAUNtt - Good morning from Huntsville!
#HESA pic.twitter.com/N4uNJzg1fI
danielle miller 
