The crew arrives at KSC

When I checked my email last night, there was a note from Phyllis (remember, she's the one that did the sharp edges test on the 10th and told me about the scheduled arrival of the crew members at KSC). She suggested I check with the PAO [Public Affairs Office] to see if I could ride to the landing strip with the press! I did, and it was definitely an experience!

The place we went was the landing strip where the shuttle is scheduled to land on May 2 (or 3rd if all goes well). The press knew the routine and I tried to blend in. That was a little hard to do when there were no camera lenses shorter than a fool long (or so it seemed) as compared to my little digital camera! We had to lay our bags along a line and a dog passed by them to sniff them. He paused a little too long at mine - kind of made me nervous. Maybe he smelled the gum! Once he completed his highly distracted pass, the cameramen set up their tri- and mono-pads with expensive cameras. I saw one of the pictures in the morning paper - they got a good shot of Pilot Scott Altman's face while he was still in the plane!

And then we waited! The schedule said they'd land at 1500, but I'm not sure they got us out there that soon, and the bus with crew families arrived a good 15 minutes after we did. There were surprisingly few people there: the press, the families, and then there were four people about whom the journalist next to me, who seemed to know everything, said, "They obviously have a lot of nerve coming into this area reserved for the press!" Oops! I looked a little closer and the guy in the red shirt looked mighty familiar, but no, it couldn't be - the crew was in quarentine! So I got close enough to read his badge and it was Alex Dunlap, the Alternate Payload Specialist, camera in hand. I chatted with him briefly, and we set a time to get together and chat tomorrow so he could tell you about his exerience. He posed with some JSC folks for the press, so I snapped one too!

You could hear them long before you saw them: five planes that looked like something out of Top gun flew over in a V formation and then disappeared for what seemed a very long time. It is apparently traditional (if my journalist friend knows what he's talking about for them to fly over and "buzz the shuttle." Actually, something inside me tells me they wouldn't risk anything too close, but I'll simply say they saluted what would become their home for 16 days very soon! When they did land, they came in single file and lined up right in front of us.

The crew member, rather reluctantly as you can see, then walked across to the mike to speak to the press. Can you tell that the families are off to our right? I think that's Dave Williams eyeing his family. Commander Richard A. Searfoss introduced the crew to the press and made a few comments before they all headed to the area where the families were waiting.

The rest of our time there was a bit mixed emotion-wise. I've mentioned that the crew members are in quarentine. Their seclusion is not exactly like solitary. They can apparently go outside and be exposed to some people, like their wives, for instance, but they cannot expose themselves to people who have not undergone a thorough checkup and children are off limits, because they can carry viruses. It was a touching scene to see the crew's kids communicating with their parents across gap of about 8 feet. Below, I was touched by the exchange that Jim Pawelczyk and his children! Hope I wasn't too intrusive. It was fun watching them as they put on hats like Dad's that he pulled out of a giant pocket in the lower leg of his flight suit.