No matter where you are in your career, transitioning to a new job and living in a new area is always an adjustment challenge. Work is getting better and I'm making progress in my research and learning new tools. I'm very glad I took this position and am amazed at the expertise of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
I still have been keeping up with the space world. It saddened me to watch (or in my case stream on-line) the launch and landing of Atlantis especially when that was the vehicle I worked on the most out at Kennedy Space Center.
Congrats to SpaceX for a successful launch today!!! I think this is a start to really take out space program in a new direction. SpaceX previously agreed with NASA to fly three demo flights of the Dragon capsule under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program. Upon successful test flights, SpaceX would then be delivering equipment to the space station.
I've also been keeping track of a friend of mine, Diego. He's currently participating in an 500-day ESA Mars Simulation (Mars500). They're in a facility in Moscow, completely isolated from the world. There were various experiments and training since last year and now they are currently in the 'fly to Mars' phase over the next 250 days, 'land and explore' for 40 days and then 'return to Earth' in 230 days. The crew hatch will remained closed until November next year!! So exciting to watch Diego go through this. You can follow Diego on twitter during the Mars500 http://twitter.com/diegou
That's it for now...I'll be keeping up with my blog now. :)
5 comments:
Welcome back!
Dragon Orion, Falcon 9 are OK ...... but shutlle is still the best.
Nice to see you back.
Lincoln Labs is one of those places most of us hear mentioned from time to time but never see, so if you can throw a couple of comments about the place and some photos, it'd be appreciated.
That said, you're a couple thousand miles away from Cape Kennedy and walking-about astronauts, but how our lives turn out is more a function of the passing years and what we do with them with simple distance. We'll need astronauts in the future; I hope you won't view moving to Massachusetts as a path away from your long term ambitions.
I was fortunate to attend the NASA Tweetup of STS-132 (http://www.spacepirations.com/2010/05/nasa-tweetup-and-atlantis-launch.html) - I'm sure you've seen plenty of shuttle launches but for me it was a first.
SpaceX success is definitely encouraging, though gap is still there, sadly.
Space coast and other NASA center employees are getting nervous (I follow some on Twitter and I really hope the shock to the system won't be as hard as some foresee.
Amnon that's awesome that you were able to see a live launch! I was watching spaceflightnow as they were going around the Tweet tent! I would have looked out for you if I knew you were going to be in the crowd!!!
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