Author: Meteorologist Mark

We just visited the area where the astronauts walk out on their way to the launch pad. Those double doors behind me are the last doors the astronauts walk out of before heading to the launch speed. God speed, future astronauts!

We just toured the veggie lab. This is where food is being grown that will be capable of providing nutritional needs for astronauts on deep space missions. Radiation is a big problem, as well as the lack of gravity. The food needs to be nutricious and good tasting. This is such a cool lab!

The “normal” blog won’t go out today. I just didn’t have time to put one together. I’m just too busy being super cool here at NASA (haha).

We’ve just boarded the NASA bus and are headed over to the NASA campus. We are supposed to be visiting a launch pad and that should be crazy cool!

The bus just pulled out and we’re off! By the way, I was just notified last night that NASA wants me to cover another launch!!! This time it will be be at Wallops island in Virginia in April. I can’t tell you how excited I am about yet another NASA-invited event!

I’ll be in touch!

Today has been very informative! The day began by clearing security (again) and then being bused to the Neil Armstrong Building on NASA’s campus. We then met in a conference room and were visited by a parade of representatives from SpaceX, NASA, and the International Space Station (ISS)….it was incredibly informative and it was awesome getting to meet so many important/cool people. Some of the speakers gave some very inspirational talks, encouraging everyone to follow your dreams.

The other social media reps here are incredible, as well. It’s cool seeing how others do what I do and the networking experience is pretty cool. I’ve even gotten some ideas that could make me some money! (ha) It was also cool to hear some clapping when, during formal introductions this morning, I said I worked for weatherTAP! We’re noticed!

Friday promises to be very, very busy but they have some incredible things planned. They let us go a bit early today to get rested up for tomorrow. Then, we meet back tomorrow night at midnight to go watch the night launch at 1:48 a.m. What a day!

The launch that I’ll be watching has flown to the ISS 16 times, always carrying cargo. Now, it is being prepared to haul astronauts. That is what this launch is all about; is SpaceX capable of carrying astronauts to space? If successful, SpaceX is liable to move forward very ambitiously with human space travel.

We’re going back to the moon. This time, we’re going with the intent of setting up a habitable station. We will see if we can mine resources (ie. fuel) needed for deeper space travel. We already know there’s some water on the Moon’s poles that we can possibly melt and use, and that’s a big deal!

Humans were first taken to space to live on the International Space Station in 2009. That means we have had humans in space now for nearly 10 years. It’s time to go farther.

By the way, the ISS weighs about 1 million pounds! Who knew?!

As many as 10,000 people in 17 countries work on various ways of keeping the ISS functioning. That’s a lot of international collaboration! The ISS is one big science lab, with several products we use having been invented for the ISS. One invention is the robotic arm, now used to perform non-invasive surgeries here on earth.

Human launches will not happen until safety can be guaranteed as much as possible. It’s better to not be flying and wish you were, rather than be flying and wish you weren’t.

NASA and SpaceX both emphasize the incredible importance of social media these days. They know they simply can’t do what they do without it. For one, if the public doesn’t support the excitement of space exploration, Congress won’t feel the need to support it financially.  Plus, now a days if you business (or whatever) isn’t on social media you might as well not exist. Think about it. I’m surely not the only one who doesn’t trust a business without a social media. I won’t even buy things from them because you wonder why they’re afraid to be on social media.

The bottom line is that it’s really cool seeing such respectable organizations, like NASA and SpaceX, placing such an enormous value on social media.

Tomorrow is going to be a very interesting day and I will do my best to bring as much of it as I can to you!

You all have a great evening.

I’m not sure the weather blog will go out tomorrow, so don’t panic if you don’t see it. (Ha) Just be advised that more heavy rain may be coming for Saturday night and Sunday. That could lead to flooding issues.