Backdropped against white clouds, space shuttle Endeavour is seen from the International Space Station shortly after undocking. Credit: NASA TV
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Don Pettit, "once normal breathing resumes, we will have this warm sensation inside that we are home"
Posted: Nov 28, 2008 07:22 pm EST
(Pythom.com) Mission accomplished, Don Pettit is coming home. Most tasks went well, except for the tool box dropped by a space-walking Astronaut the other day. "Oh great, oh great, oh great!" she fumed in her space suit, but then good news arrived. Sort of.
An amateur sky watcher had located the $100,000 box with his telescope, he told media, and sure enough - a white object flew past the TV-screen.
Some down-to earth numbers
"Listen up, folks - you secure everything, everything, EVERYTHING," moaned an explorer know-it-all at the news broadcast.
"All the tools have strings attached," Don had said earlier about his EVA's however so it's not clear what happened in this case - and who cares about $100,000 these days anyway:
The next scheduled $700 billion bailout equals seven times the world's commercial space industry revenues ($100 billion/yearly, most from satellite comms), just to put numbers in perspective.
"...because we could"
Snow falling outside and leftover turkey cooling in the fridge; yesterday evening we sat down to watch Don's chat from the Space Station on NASA TV.
They had just made 3 toasts, Don said. One for Thanksgiving, one for something else and the third... "because we could," Don reported - echoing a number of explorers but also recent auto- and banking execs, in reply to how come they took the previous bailout and ran.
After the drinks, Endeavour's crew left the Station for a night out: that is a nap on the shuttle before undocking this morning for the scheduled landing at Kennedy Space Center, Fla., Sunday at 1:19 p.m.
Coming home
But what is it like to come home...from Space? Here goes Don's dispatch from the Space Station on his previous ride:
"The feeling of being home is directly proportional to how far you have traveled. When you go out to dinner, you feel home when you pull into the driveway. When you go for a drive to a state park some distance out of town, you feel home when you enter the outskirts of your city."
"When you drive across the United States, perhaps on one of those memorable family vacations, you get this warm feeling of being home when you cross over your state line. When you go on international travels, particularly when returning from places with radically different cultures, you feel home the first place your airplane lands on U.S. soil. You may still be 2,000 miles from home, but you have this wonderful sensation in your heart that speaks out to you."
"After having been on Space Station for nearly six months, we will be returning on the Soyuz spacecraft and be landing on the desert plains of Kazakhstan. When our capsule goes thump on those desert flats, we will be literally on the opposite side of the world, nearly 12,000 miles from home."
"Yet once normal breathing resumes, we will have this warm sensation inside that we are home. I can picture sometime in the future, a crew will be returning from Mars and after inserting themselves into low Earth orbit, perhaps from an aero-braking maneuver, they will look down from their orbital vantage point at this blue jewel circling below and say, 'We are home'."
When Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry February 1, 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard, Don Pettit was one of the three crewmembers aboard the International Space Station. Further shuttle flights were cancelled, and Don - scheduled to return to Earth the following month - realized his ride home had been scrubbed.
After logging over 161 days in space, including over 13 EVA (spacewalk) hours, the Expedition-6 crew finally returned to Earth on a Soyuz TMA-1; nearly crashing on the Kazakhstan tundra. Puzzled, ground control watched empty skies while miles away from targeted landing site - three men donned in survival gear sat in a tent by a capsule scorched black from a slightly uncontrolled descent. They were located 5 hours later and Don could go home, at last.
This year it was time again. Space shuttle Endeavour - with Don once again on it - lifted off Friday, November 14 at 7:55 p.m. EST on its STS-126 mission to the International Space Station.
Endeavour arrived at the station Nov. 16. She carried about 32,000 pounds, delivering equipment that will help allow the station to double its crew size to six. The gear included two sleep bunks; a new galley, a water recycler and an exercise device based on resistance training (think rubber bands).
Astronauts performed four spacewalks cleaning and fixing the starboard Solar Alpha Rotary Joint. Engineer Sandra Magnus replaced Greg Chamitoff, now a mission specialist returning to Earth aboard Endeavour.
After the standard late inspection of Endeavour’s thermal protection system using the shuttle’s robotic arm and its Orbiter Boom Sensor System extension; the crew undocked from the station at 9:47 a.m. EST Friday and is expected home Sunday.
Orbiter: Endeavour
Mission: STS-126
Primary Payload: Multi-Purpose Logistics Module
Launched: Nov. 14
Launch Time: 7:55 p.m. EST
Launch Pad: 39A
Mission Duration: 15 days
Landing Date: Nov. 29
Landing Time: 2:23 p.m. EST
Landing Site: Kennedy Space Center
Inclination/Altitude: 51.6 degrees/122 nautical miles
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