I guess I've been negligent in keeping y'all informed on what's going on at NASA. Shuttle STS-133 is tentatively going up in October. STS-134 in February, and STS-135 in June 2011. All this depends on congress but we've already received funding for extending shuttle into Fiscal 2011. STS-135 will be Atlantis if it gets final approval. It'll ride the external tank damaged during Katrina. There's an additional 2 external tanks in construction and a third complete tank but it's an older model - still useable.

STS-133 is mine (as one of the mission managers). STS-134 is supposed to be one of my co-workers but he's getting promoted and moving on to big and better things so I'll have to cover that flight too. STS-135 is mine too. Shuttle missions are fun to work and I gotta put in lots of hours but I get comp time for some of the additional hours.

Missions are my secondary responsibility. I'm a design/construction manager at Johnson. I just wrapped up a $4M project replacing all the natural gas piping at the site and am starting up a $7.5M utility tunnel flood mitigation for the entire site. I oversee maintenance and operations of the Mission Control Power Plant (yeah - we got a 10 MW power plant just for mission control). Mission control still has space station so it's not going anywhere.

Tom