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Pat Duggins
Pat Duggins
Senior News Analyst
pduggins@wmfe.org


 

DISCOVERY’S BACK—Hubble’s last hurrah, and Miami’s NPR station celebrates “Space Day”

June 16th, 2008--Discovery landed without incident on Saturday, ending its mission to deliver the 32,000 pound Japanese Kibo Lab to the International Space Station.

 The Goddard Space Center up in Maryland had something else on its mind.

 

That NASA facility is working on the next Space Shuttle flight, which is the last repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope in October. The STS-125 crew patch is pictured here. Goddard had a small set-up at the Kennedy Space Center press site, with a video presentation on a loop, and even news releases in folders complete with paper clips bent to resemble the venerable Hubble observatory. If you ask veteran Astronaut Mike Foale, who flew on the 3rd repair flight to the telescope in 1999, tinkering with telescope can be nerve wracking. One of his spacewalks was to replace a computer on Hubble. “My little hands could have ruined Hubble forever,” he recalled during our interview, “and that's a horrible responsibility. It's one which I took,, but at the moment I did it, I was very worried about it." The upcoming repair mission’s crew might have cause for concern as well. Hubble operates in a different orbit and at a higher altitude than the International Space Station. NASA’s not planning on retreating to the orbiting outpost if Atlantis is damaged during launch. Most likely, the Astronauts will sit there in orbit until a rescue Shuttle comes.

 

On lighter note, I headed over to the Space Coast again today. But, instead of KSC, my destination was a Durango’s Steakhouse. Miami’s NPR station, WLRN, had a “space day” during its recent membership drive. Instead of tote bags and mugs, they offered signed copies of “Final Countdown” as the pledge gift. There was also a sweepstakes with the grand prize of a trip the Kennedy Space Center Visitors Center and a chat with me. (Again, you have to wonder what the winners got ;) Rebecca Larotonda and Michael Quinn won, and I got the chance to swap space stories with them and sign their books, and “a good time was had by all”.

 

On a closing note, many thanks for all the hits and comments for that YouTube clip of the UCF-TV “Expressions” interview program on “Final Countdown”. If you like, here’s the link…

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv_lMXGFtFA

 

More to come…  

 

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