Meet The Astronauts
For the lady I ranted about in here a while back who complained that she didn't know anything about current astronauts, and that it was somehow NASA's fault, presumably because we don't spam people with astronaut biographies, here's a new feature that may or may not be ongoing in my blog. Of course, it won't actually do that lady any good, unless of course she runs searches on the Internet for herself as lady complain didn't know about astronauts. And, of course, Google crawls my blog so doing a search works.
My coworker, JoCasta, is currently in Philadelphia representing NASAexplores like we did recently in San Francisco. However, unlike S.F., where we had our own booth that was half of a limited NASA presence at the convention, in Philly, JoCasta is working in a large NASA section representing a wide variety of agency education programs. In the booth with her are NASA education head Adena Loston, and Educator Astronaut program heads Debbie Brown and Leland Melvin.
Leland Melvin is an astronaut candidate who was selected at the same time as Barbara Morgan (who will be at the Philly convention later on) in 1998. While he's awaiting being assigned to his first flight, he's working on the EA program, guiding the process that will lead to the selection of teachers to become astronauts. Melvin is a little unconventional compared to how people think of contemporary astronauts--engineers and physicists who wore white lab coats prior to space suits. While that's true of Leland as well, most people don't associate that with also being a professional football player. His honors include both an Invention Disclosure Award for Lead Insensitive Fiber Optic Phase Locked Loop Sensor and being named an NCAA Division I Academic All American.
During EA presentations, Melvin is a great spokesperson for the agency, coming across with great energy and excitement when he talks about spaceflight, though he's not yet been up, himself. JoCasta said he's the same way in person, very nice and charismatic. He even talked with her about Lasik surgery (Jo can't apply for the Educator Astronaut program because she had Lasik surgery. Leland said that requirement may change, they just haven't done enough testing yet [apparently the concern is that the back of the eye is weakened by the surgery, and the eye could suffer significant damage [pop!] during the pressures associated with liftoff and landing]).
So there you go, info about an astronaut. Now, when he is selected to fly, you'll be able to tell people that you'd heard about him back when he was still just a candidate.

:: :: 09:53 :: David :: [permalink] ::