Day Six @ NASA

The Florida Solar Energy Center was an interesting time of finding how to save money. Back in 1997, two identical houses were built here within one block of each other here in Florida. One was a regular house and another with al the latest energy saving devices built into it. It costs $40,000 more for the environment friendly house. It turns out that the eco-friendly house is 92% cheaper to keep running. A couple of great websites to check out are www.energywhiz.com and www.fsec.ucf.edu/en/.

The afternoon we spent in a planetarium looking at the stars. Did you know the sun is 93 million miles from the Earth? Or did you know the sun moves in 11-year cycles? And that the oldest room in the world is located in Ireland?

Tonight we had a dinner with a real live astronaut! It was awesome! His name was Sam Gemar. He rode on shuttle missions STS-38, STS-48 and STS-62. He was one of 5000 people who applied to be an astronaut in 1985. Only 13 of the applicants were accepted into the program. The first two years of an astronaut’s life are spent training and evaluating. Another year is spent training for a specific mission. Currently there are 100 astronauts in the program.
Seven days before a mission lifts-off, the astronauts are placed in quarantine. This is to keep them from getting sick before flight. On launch day, none of them eat breakfast, that’s because they have a 70% chance of barfing if they do. Yuck – imagine having to spend a couple of hours sitting in your barf?! Actually, they are in their 80 pound space suits for about 5.5 hours. Three hours and 15 minutes before flight they’re on their back in their shuttle seats. They really aren’t too busy until five minutes before flight.

Take off is loud and rough. 6.5 million pounds of thrust hurdles them into space. A 747 produces only 60,000 pounds of thrust. Eventually they are flying at 17,500 mph. How fast is that? For every heart beat they fly five miles! In one day they will cross the Equator 32 times and observe 16 sunrises. They prepare for landing when they are 4,200 miles away. The temperature outside the shuttle in daylight is +250F, in darkness it’s –250F. In the shuttle temperature is maintained at 70 – 80F. Inside the spacesuit at landing it gets up to 102F.

So what kind of technology does the space shuttle computers use? The they have 512k memory and use only 256k. As a matter of fact, the next mission, STS-118 will be using a GPS – like what most of the new mobile phones have. Did you ever stop to think that the computer you are using right now to read this is just as or likely more powerful than those on the shuttle!

Pretty much the whole flight is run on auto-pilot. Once the shuttle passes through Mach 1 on the return, the pilot usually switches to manual control.
That’s about it for today. See you tomorrow.