Travis and Michelle Fitzgerald's blog

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. Michelle and I have been working crazy hours during the shuttle flight. Since this was my flight, I observed all of the major activities. Unfortunately, that, along with my normal duties at work, left me with little time to do anything else but catch a little sleep in between shifts.

Here's a brief list of activities that I watched: launch, rendezvous and docking, truss install, solar array deploy, and undocking. I got a chance to watch all 3 shifts of my flight controllers work, and, I must say, I'm very proud of them. They all made it look really easy, even though this was, by far, THE most complicated flight that the ISS team has ever flown. Kudos, guys.

I won't bore you with the gruesome details, but the end result was that the shuttle delivered the ISS a new truss segment and 2 sets of solar arrays. Landing is on Wednesday morning just before 5 am.

Here is what the ISS looked like as the shuttle, Atlantis, was arriving:

And this is what it looked like after Atlantis left:

Here's my favorite picture of the flight, with a good view of Atlantis docked to the ISS:

This last one is a good "farewell" shot, taken as Atlantis was leaving:

There are lots more pictures to show, and most of them can be found at the Shuttle Mission Imagery page.

Also, for those of you who like video, be sure to check out this video of Atlantis' launch, as taken from a camera on top of the Solid Rocket Boosters. It's a big file, but worth it.