Now that we were ready for the mission, the Shuttle program rolled the Orbiter
back out of the OPF and into the VAB.  This occurred on March 23, 2009.

Click here for a panorama of this event


Here you can see the aft end of the Orbiter as it moves onto the VAB.
My yellow lanyard is in recognition of the pinball newsgroup that I read: RGP.


Roll out of the Orbiter occurs under armed guard by several
of these soldiers.


Once the Orbiter is stacked to the External Tank in the VAB,
it is rolled via the crawler to the launch pad.  Here you can see
the stack going up the ramp of the pad.


This was shot right after the arrival of the Space Shuttle at Pad 39A on 3/31/09.

More images of the roll out:
Spaceflightnow.com
KSC Media Archive


This is an image of me standing under the main engines with the
Shuttle on the pad.

A panorama courtesy of Ross Henry of the slide-wire basket entry area.


During our work at the PHSF facility at KSC, we once had a fire alarm that caused
us to evacuate the cleanroom.  It was very odd to walk outside with our cleanroom
suits on.  This occurred during the astronaut familiarization meeting on 4/2/09.


This is a picture of all 40 of us in front of the Marshalling Area sign.  The astronaut
crew is on the right half of the image.  Mike Soluris is shooting our picture.


One of my coworkers was Minal Kashkari, who is the wife of Neel Kashkari,
the financial recovery czar for the Bush/Obama administration.



After the crew training session, we had a picnic at the KSC recreational
park to along with the crew.  Top: with John Grunsfeld (lead spacewalker) and
Frank Cepollina (head of HST servicing).  Bottom: with Scott Altman (commander) and Greg Magnusen (lead GSE engineer).


KSC is a wildlife sanctuary, and you often see all kinds of wildlife,
including this bald eagle, armadillo, gators, etc.

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(c) 2009, Edward Cheung, all rights reserved.