 Traveling With Truman
Mission Possible: Launch of a Space Shuttle
12/07/06
Dear Diary:
I am enjoying my time in Brevard, Florida. I even received a phone call inviting me to the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery! Mission STS-116 will take off tonight. It will be the first night-time launch in four years. They plan to reconfigure the electrical and cooling systems on the International Space Station and drop off Sunita Williams for her six-month-long visit on the international space station. They will also be bringing Thomas Relter back home to the earth. I have a long day ahead of me. We have to get there early because we have to get badged to sit in the press section, and my friends have told me there is a lot of traffic when the shuttle goes up. Ill tell you all about it tonight!
12/08/06
Dear Diary:
How disappointing! They had to scrub the launch (scrub means that they had to cancel). They were down to the last hold at T-5; the count down clock even started to move forward to T-4:59, when they called the launch for the night because of the clouds. Sorry that I didnt write last night! My friends were right about the traffic we didnt get home until one in the morning.
The day wasnt a total loss. I learned a lot and got to meet some really cool people. When we got there, we really werent sure where to go. We stopped into the badging office first and gave them a copy of our identification. They signed us in and gave us a media badge with the mission number on it. They told us how we could get to the press area. We were assigned a seat in the pews, which are actually three rows of long tables. Theyre set up especially for the reporters so they can set up their computers, phones and other equipment.
We got to sign up to interview an astronaut, too. We hoped to talk to
someone who was going up on this mission, but they were all in quarantine. They have to stay away from everyone for 30 days before the launch to make sure that they stay healthy during their mission. We did get to speak with a German astronaut named Hans Schlegel.  He said that he didnt decide to become an astronaut until he was 35. He told us that there are a lot of different jobs that you can do when you are an astronaut, so if that is what you want to be when you grow up, pick something that you enjoy doing, do it as well as you can and do it as well as you can as part of a team. I asked him if he reads a lot. He said that he reads a lot to prepare for his job, and that he enjoys reading with his children for fun. He told us a lot of other really cool things about space.
 After that, we got to go outside and watch the caravan go by with all the astronauts. For five of them, this was going to be their first time in space. They must have been sad to go through all of this and then not take off. We had been hearing bad reports on the weather all day, and they finally decided that the clouds were too low for them to launch. Theyll try again on Saturday.
12/9/06
Wow! That was the most awesome thing I have ever seen! You couldnt even see the shuttle from where we were standing by the clock; all you could see was this huge white light getting bigger and bigger, and then rising off the ground. For a couple of seconds, you felt as if it were daytime, then you could hear the roar as it took off. By the time we walked from the clock back to the press building, the two solid rocket boosters had separated from the shuttle and were falling back to the Earth. I read that they each weigh 1.38 million pounds and provide 2.908 million pounds of thrust less than a second after they start the launch. 
I was so glad that it wasnt scubbed again. When the day started, they still werent sure that it would launch because of the weather. There was only a 30% chance that it would go. This time the wind was more of a problem than the clouds, but it calmed down just in time. Now theyre on their way to the International Space Station.
Cool Stuff I Learned....
The space shuttle weighs 4.5 million pounds at lift off.
The stars dont twinkle in outer space, because you are not looking at them through the earths atmosphere.
For a few days after you come back from being on a mission, when you close your eyes to go to sleep at night youll still feel like youre floating.
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