Sailing With the Stars: International Space Station

Sailing With the Stars: International Space StationBringing ET-134 to Kennedy Space Center has one purpose; launch STS-130 to the International Space Station. NASA's top priority today is to fly the space shuttle safely and complete construction of the space station. It's been a long road getting from there to here!

Scroll over to your right, then down to space station over flights of your town. Click and you'll find yourself on a NASA Johnson Space Center Website. In the left column you'll find a place to enter your country and find your home town and that'll show you when the space station will overfly your town.

The over flight will be fast; and the time of day is important because space station is best viewed just before dawn or the beginning of morning nautical twilight and just after fading evening light or the ending of evening nautical twilight; perhaps the station will approach from the southwest, sail over your town in 2-5 minutes at 220 miles above you and depart to the Northeast.

I hadn't made an effort to see the station over fly Huntsville, Ala., for quite some time, until one day last year I studied the tracking charts, found that it would make a spectacular flight over Huntsville in a few days. That evening I hooked up my two bichons and went out to see the station. It was an amazing over flight. With ten-power binoculars I could detect a great deal of detail including that the space shuttle was docked, a gigantic spread of sail, or rather, solar arrays, and the space station had grown -- big time -- to the size of a football field.

When I joined NASA in 1991, I was immediately joined at the hip with space station. It has been part of my daily duties ever since in one public affairs capacity or another. The space station has evolved from development models and design charts to real hardware during the intervening years. It is simply a marvel, flying through space at 17,000 miles per hour, brighter than the stars; so much so you might say it is a star...well, it is a Star!


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