PoSSUM - Day 5

Look, Ma! I'm flying upside-down!!

At first I was a little disappointed that most of my in-flight selfies ended up pointed straight up my nose, but I kind of like the way this one has my face reflected and magnified on the bubble canopy overhead. This flight was in the front seat of an Extra 300 aerobatic plane.

I was first up from the group to fly today, so afterwards I went back to the hotel to take a nap and a shower and study a little for our final exam. I took it this evening and hooray! I passed with 100%!

PoSSUM - Day 4

Today, I...

... tried on a spacesuit designed by Russian spacesuit designer Nikolay Moiseev, then flew a simulated science mission (while the suit was fully sealed up and pressurized).

... took an aerobatic flight in a Super Decathlon stunt plane, involving high-g loops and turns, flying upside down and even a few seconds of zero gravity.

... and drove around Daytona Beach, looking for a grocery store, or really anyplace, that sold bananas.

All three missions went smoothly and successfully!

PoSSUM - Day 3

This will be a very short overview of a very long day. Woke up at 5:30 to be on the bus by 6:30. Drove down to Melbourne (a little over an hour away with 15 full-sized adults in a van - and I was crammed into the back corner) to go to the Southern Aero Medical Institute for high altitude hypoxia training. We entered a big, metal tube, three at a time, and slowly lowered the air pressure and oxygen to the levels you would find at 21,000 feet. As our bodies ran out of oxygen, we had to be aware of our own personal symptoms, so we could recognize them again if it happened in a real flight. For me, I felt cold along the tops of my legs (but that could have been the chilly room), a slight tightness across the chest and a light-headed, almost dizzy feeling. As soon as we started feeling something, they had us put on our oxygen masks then brought us back to normal pressure. Here's a view of the chamber through the front door.

We finished up a little ahead of schedule, so we skipped the Cuban restaurant we had planned on and returned to Daytona Beach, where we all went to dinner at a place right by the beach called the Ocean Deck. Afterwards, we all went out to the beach and took a lot of goofy pictures. We were trying to do our own version of the "bunch of astronauts, walking side-by-side in dramatic slow motion" video, but on the beach. Our fun, however, was short-lived. We had to get back to Embry-Riddle by 7:00 for three more hours of briefings, on things like celestial navigation, mission design parameters, the spacesuits we'll be trying on and the flight camera systems. Now, finally, it's bedtime. More fun awaits tomorrow!

PoSSUM - Day 2

I have the feeling this will be the first of many long days. Up at 6:30, breakfast, then over to start a day full of lectures and briefings. That would have been enough, but then we had a couple more hours getting an overview of the flight simulator. It looks very nice.  I didn't have a chance to get in it today, but I watched the procedures over the shoulders of a few other students, so I'm starting to understand the flow of the mission. I should get my chance to try it out, dressed in a full, real spacesuit, on Monday morning. Then a bit of a break for dinner and back to Embry-Riddle for our evening activity - a very interesting panel discussion about the intersections of science and art. It featured the PoSSUM lead scientist, two astronauts, a neuroscientist who now runs a nonprofit student space art competition and an underwater performance artist from Australia. Now I'm finally back in my room. It's nearly 11:00 and we need to be up and ready to hop on the bus tomorrow morning at 6:30 to go get the oxygen sucked out of our brains. Wish me luck!

The science side of the simulator

PoSSUM - Day 1

Another 4 hours of driving and I got to Daytona Beach. I checked in to the hotel, drove around town a little to figure out where things were (found the school and the beach, but didn't stop at either of them - yet), then went back to the hotel. In the room I met my roommate, Ahmed Farid, who was born in Egypt but now lives in Munich and works at the German version of Mission Control. I mentioned that SpaceX was planning to launch in about an hour, but that I wasn't sure if I wanted to drive for another hour down to try to see it - but he was up for driving so off we went in his rental car (a shiny red Dodge Challenger - not bad!) We didn't make it all the way down to the launch site, but we were able to see it streaking through the clear blue sky. I tried to get a picture, but it just shows up as a tiny dot.

Then we went back to the first activity - the evening reception for all the staff and participants. The director (Dr. Jason Reimuller) went over the schedule and introduced our special guests this week - astronauts Don Pettit and Nicole Stott! I also got to meet the other participants. We have 3 Egyptians in the program, a lady from Romania who lives in Toronto, a lady from India who works for NASA Ames (over near San Francisco) and a handful of Americans, from places like Virginia, South Carolina, Texas and just the other side of Florida. Then, as we were wrapping it up, we were all given our stuff - books, schedules, etc. - and FLIGHT SUITS!! I've been worried that it wouldn't fit right (even though I sent in my measurements when I ordered it) but it fits perfectly! It's even long enough in the sleeves! I've never had a flight suit long enough in the sleeves! So I'll wrap up tonight's update with a (slightly blurry) pic of me in my new suit!

Click to embiggen!

PoSSUM - Day 0

Okay, I realize this is neither a drawing nor a poem, but this is my blog so I'm changing the rules. For the next week or so I'll be using this site to keep all my loyal readers (i.e. my family) up to date on my adventures in Florida with Project PoSSUM.

So what is Project PoSSUM, you may ask. Well, PoSSUM stands for Polar Suborbital Science in the Upper Mesosphere and this is a week of training 12 select people from around the world (myself included) to be citizen scientist astronauts. The main goal is to familiarize us with a suite of instruments that will photograph and measure noctilucent clouds, amazingly high altitude clouds that form at the very edge of space (about 85 km up). Then, hopefully, in a couple of years when the funding and vehicles are finalized, we'll be the ones to actually fly up there and collect the data (or help with other research programs).

Here's the program website: www.projectpossum.org - there's a lot of information, but you can get a good idea of what I'll be doing by watching the video on the front page. I recommend expanding it to full screen.

Today was my first travel day - driving all day from Indiana down to Tifton, Georgia. Tomorrow I'll drive the rest of the way to Daytona Beach and meet the other people in Class 1601. Keep checking back for updates!