A new game... Post pics from your cel phone V.1.0

[BruceK]

I've always been a fan of the various space programs so my wife and I traveled five hours to South Padre Island to see the next launch (and booster catch!) of the huge SpaceX Starship rocket.

Blastoff was scheduled for 5:30 PM Friday (Feb 28) afternoon, but unfortunately it was postponed until at least Monday (Mar 3) afternoon.  Our schedules and hotel reservations would not allow us to stay that long so we're going to miss this one and we'll have to try to see it again some other time. 

With no launch happening on Friday, we decided to drive to the Starbase and see what we could see of the launchpad and rocket hardware. It's incredible how close you can get to everything right on the public road to the beach. The rocket was not fully assembled. The upper stage, the Starship, sat separately from the Heavy Booster which was already sitting on the launchpad from the last launch when it was successfully caught by the "chopsticks" after the flight in January.

I'm looking forward to trying again sometime to watch the launch and especially the booster recovery. 

Pretty cool. My daughter is an engineer at a company in Wilmington, Ma. that does work for Space X, she worked on the fixturing for thruster nozzles on the Dragon capsule.
This past summer during sailboat racing season I needed extra crew one night to sail with my sister and me, an unassuming woman volunteered, ends up she had returned from the ISS in April aboard Soyuz. Look her up Loral O'Hara. She was on Expedition 68 to the ISS. She was visiting Woods Hole for part of the summer as she had worked at The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on the Alvin sub, Alvin was the sub that found the Titanic. For a kid who grew up with Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, sailing with a real astronaut was the highlight of my summer.

That is so cool!  I would love to meet an actual astronaut. 

[bikewiz]

That is so cool!  I would love to meet an actual astronaut. 

She thought it was funny that I was so excited about sailing with her. I had to explain I was the kid that saw the moon landing live on a black and white TV with my dad, built the model of the Saturn 5 rocket, and knew that Soyuz lands in Kazakhstan.(what a geek!)
The sub guys from the Alvin project sail too and made it known that there are far less humans to dive deeper than 20,000 feet than have flown to space, I guess it's an interesting statistic.
This is a picture of the retired Alvin titanium sphere that's on display in Woods Hole, it's a whole lot of titanium!