An Awesome Astronaut

Some friends of ours here who have been here for two years now and are much better at navigating what is going on found out that a US Astronaut who worked at NASA for her entire career and flew 5 mission to the International Space Station would be doing a presentation at the University of Canterbury here in Christchurch. They had extra tickets and kindly gave them to us! We had an AMAZING TIME!!! It was a very intimate setting and also very cool and nostalgic to step back into a college (uni) lecture hall! Flashbacks for sure :) And then a little teary realizing that one day Tyler will be there not as an adorable 7 year old, but an actual student. Well, he better be!!!!

We had Tyler pretend he was the studious one and Daddy is supposed to be sleeping! 

Marsha Ivins' presentation was also INCREDIBLE. She has been on 5 missions to the Space Station and the most is 7. Her story was also incredible because she did not go to MIT and wasn't top in her class or a fighter pilot. She went to University of Bolder in Colorado and got a degree in Aeronautical Engineering and started working with NASA right out of college as an engineer and helped develop the space shuttle. She tried three times before being accepted as an astronaut and went as Flight Engineer on all 5 of her missions. The presentation was about 45 minutes long and kept Tyler captivated because she covered everything from the funny things hair does, and how all the astronauts love to fly with their arms out just like Superman, and other funny zero gravity antics and the joys of eating space food. Did you know their liquid waste is recycled back into potable water....ewwww!!! There were tons of incredible photos of Earth from the Space Station! Did you know that on the moon the Earth follows the same cycles as the moon here....ie Full, Quarter, Half, New. I loved the pic of the moons surface with a "half earth" on the horizon. The Earth's cities lit up at night were also incredible she had Vegas and Christchurch so it was cool! Watching Tyler's face light up when he heard something that was important or known to him was also really cool! The Space Station orbits the earth 16 times in a day so they see a lot of amazing sunsets and sunrises! I didn't look much but here are two youtube videos that were similar to some of what we saw last night! What a cool experience!!!!