Go, Stan!

One of my high-school classmates is headed into space today. Dr. Stanely Love is Mission Specialist 4 on STS-122, scheduled to launch today at 2:45PM EST. There’s live video coverage here and tons of info about the mission here, from which I grabbed this photo of Stan [I don’t know whether he goes by Stan or Stanley these days–I knew him as Stan, but that was 25 years ago] during training:

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Our high school wasn’t a particularly nice place if you happened to not be in the “in” crowd, and Stan most definitely wasn’t in that crowd. (I wasn’t either. You probably guessed that.) Well, here we are, 25 years later, and Stan’s an astronaut, about to do what he’s dreamed of doing since he was a kid. I’d love to know how many of the “in” crowd are still in Eugene pumping gas or something. (Chris told me a very gratifying story awhile ago about returning to his home town a year or so ago and discovering that his high-school football champ was still pumping gas at the same place he worked when he was in high school.)

Safe flight, Stan. Chalk one up for the nerds.

By adam

Go ahead, try to summarize yourself in a sentence or two.

6 comments

  1. His name is Dr. Love!!!! HAHAHAHA

    (erm, ya… some of us have never left high school).

    Still amazing to go into space… though not much up there, yet

  2. Awesome’s the word for it. That launch was smooth as silk. I haven’t watched a launch for awhile either, but I was a NASA TV junkie in the early days of the ISS and during the Mars rover landings. (Those rovers are still going strong, BTW, despite having outlived their planned lifespan by several times over.)

    Watch the spacewalks when they happen. The schedule for the NASA TV coverage should be up on the site soon if it’s not already. “Awesome” only begins to describe what those folks do up there. I am completely amazed when I watch them do stuff like lift a new hunk of the ISS out of the shuttle bay and bolt it on to the existing structure, and that’s exactly one of the things they’re going to do this mission.

  3. Yeah…looks like you can tune for a pretty big stretch on Sunday to watch one of the spacewalks while they “grapple” the new module.

    Seems like people are pretty tuned out to NASA and space these days. I guess it’s hard to keep the media’s attention when most launches either look the same or go fairly smoothly.

    Personally, though, I can’t watch something like that and not be inspired. Maybe I’ll go identify a few galaxies over at Galaxy Zoo (http://www.galaxyzoo.org).

  4. Yeah, the media thrives on controversy, embarassment, suffering, and sensationalism. A shuttle launch that goes as planned is seen as business as usual and not worthy of much more than a short mention somewhere. Ironically, part of the whole idea of the space shuttle was to make spaceflight something more or less routine. The needs of science and mass media are most certainly not the same. There was a clip on CNN.com recently about some Iraq war vet who lost both legs near the knees and now is starting to walk again thanks to a pair of very sophisticated artificial legs. They’re really remarkable pieces of engineering, and what did the reporter emphasize as the most interesting part of the whole thing? The fact that they use Bluetooth (“just like your cell phone”) to communicate position and velocity information to each other. Apparently it wasn’t interesting enough that this guy was able to walk again thanks to an engineering solution to a problem that people have been working on basically as long as people have been losing legs. Instead they had to go on about what Bluetooth was and how it’s used in these legs–even though that’s one of the least-significant aspects of the project, since really any short-range radio system could do the same thing.

    But I digress. I also find what NASA does to be really inspiring, and they deserve far more media (and public) attention than they get.

  5. Hey, wasn’t sure where to jump in, Brian Koelling gave me your website. GO STAN! and yeah, you wanna know where those “in” crowd people really are? I can tell you, went to the reunion…I told my husband I figured the two who’d probably done the most with their lives were you, and Jacqui Healey (remember her? we lost contact a few years back….she was a good friend since 7th grade) anyway, my husband and I just recently received in the mail a copy of Gary Numan’s Telecon (I’d already had Replicas), and I told him I remembered the guy who turned me onto Numan ~ it was you in 8th grade! Anyway, there is so much to potentially respond to…the thread here regarding the links Tracie found I also felt compelled to respond to, both myself and my husband have worked extensively with Autistic non-verbals (he still does) and communication devices ~ and we are both pretty new at creating electronic music. My kids all do, too. Middle son is showcased here on our webpage as “Buttnuggett” (yeah THAT’S an original name!) and our latest collaborative venture is Dead Mime Society. We do our own individual stuff, too, *very* experimental (I wasn’t even going to let people listen to mine until my husband decided he liked it ~ anyway…I’m all off-topic and all over the board, I’m terribly sorry. Wanted to reach out and find you since the reunion. Of course, you are doing well, very well. I hope you choose to contact me back. I’m almost embarassed to share my husband and my musical ventures, as we mostly just fart around – however we would like to expand our knowledge and software base!! And we do create in the moment, we just sort of wait until the kids are gone or heavily into a video game and throw stuff together.
    okay ~ I did try to contact you via email also. Again, I’m not sure why I felt compelled to reach out, but I am most certainly NOT surprised you and yours have so much in common with me and mine ~ I would love to hear some samples of your CD. Is that possible? I’d be happy to buy the CD, I’m sure we would enjoy it, but it would be nice to take a listen if possible.
    Cheers ~ Andrea

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