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Pat Duggins
Pat Duggins
Senior News Analyst
pduggins@wmfe.org


 

March 19, 2008—With five spacewalks scheduled over the twelve days Endeavour is docked to the International Space Station, the astronauts are getting off-time to just look out the window.

 

Endeavour Commander Dom Gorie is pictured here next to one of the double paned windows of the Shuttle’s cockpit. Specifically, it’s one of the smaller windows at the back, affording a view into the cargo bay and of Spacewalker Rick Linnehan floating outside. No, my vision isn’t that sharp, Linnehan wore the spacesuit with the solid red stripes

 

Anyway, on to the “sight seeing”. Linnehan got a great view of Chicago at night as the Shuttle and Space Station circled the globe. Rookie Bob Behnken stated before liftoff that he wanted to see all the cities he trained at for the mission. The list included Star City in Russia (that’s where the Cosmonauts train), Scuba (Japan’s space headquarters), and Toronto and Montreal where the spacewalkers were familiarized with the two hundred million dollar Canadian built robot called Dextre.

 

As great as the view of Earth is, according to the astronauts—there’s great and then there’s “great”. Inside the Shuttle, the windows are double-paned for safety. When astronauts go out on spacewalks, there’s just a thin, single visor between them and outer space. Crewmembers who go outside say the view is clearer and wider than when they get inside the Shuttle. Rookie spacewalkers are told to take thirty seconds, pick a certain landmark, and really burn it into their memories as a souvenir of the flight.

 

Onto other subjects, tickets are already selling fast for that fundraiser at Harvard. I’ve been asked to talk about my “Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program” as the keynote for the Mount Washington Observatory’s Spring fundraiser in Boston. If you’re in the area, and are free the evening of April 12th, click here for more information…

 

http://www.mountwashington.org/events/boston/

 

Also, enjoyed meeting everyone at College Park’s “Sunday in the Park” family picnic over the weekend. I was asked to “emcee” the event, and a number of people dropped by to get copies of the book signed. I won’t say who since a lot of these folks are using them for birthday or “Father’s Day” gifts. You can get yours at Barnes and Noble, amazon.dot.com, Scientific American's Book Club, the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, or the Kennedy Space Center Visitors' Center bookstore, among others.

 

More to come.

 

Photo courtesy of NASA

 

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