STS - Still holding . . .

The flight of Discovery STS 114 has gone very well so far, thank goodness. This post is a follow up to my recent (7/26/05) post, "We all hold our breath."
This early morning there was a press conference with all nine crew members of the combined Discovery-International Space Station mission participating. Some thoughts:

• Nations represented in language or acccent included the United States, Russia, Japan, and Australia. Members of the international press asked questions from multiple locations in the US, and also from Japan and Russia. Soichi Noguchi, our photograher/EVA man, fielded a large number of questions from the Japanese press location. It was so interesting to see the rest of the nine crew members sit patiently as that Q&A continued for several minutes. There were several instances of people speaking in a second language. One Japanese questioner asked our Commander Collins a question in English, as did Russian reporters. And our man, John Phillips, stationed on board the ISS since April of 2005, speaks Russian to his ISS fellow crewman, Sergei Krikalev. I was struck by how much it must have meant to those in Japan, Australia, and Russia to each have "one of their own" working in space. It is such magnificent work done in peace to ultimately benefit all of humankind.
• Communication technology has come far since the Russians launched Sputnik, when President Kennedy began our journey to the moon. I can remember having only my ears upon which to rely for so many years, as I vicariously made all those journeys with the astronauts. All that has improved dramatically. For example, now the American crewman on the ISS speaks on the phone every day to his family, sends and receives e-mail, and visits with them weekly via video linkup. Amazing! It is more fun for everyone this way.
• It is so gratifying to see women playing such meaningful roles in space exploration. One on this mission, Eileen Collins, is a very skillful and articulate leader of the STS 144 mission. Her manner must inspire confidence in everyone on board. The other is Wendy Lawrence, one of the crew member robotic arm operators, and fully in charge of the huge and complicated transfer of materiale back and forth between the shuttle and the ISS. She humorously dubbed all the other crew members doing the tugging, hauling to and fro, accounting item by item as her "Transfer Drones." She seems completely unflappable. The EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity)"dance" done by she and Soichi as he stood (or hung by his feet) on the end of her remote robotic arm was amazing. For example, Soichi would ask her to move the arm "4 inches to port," the move would be delicately made, ending with Wendy's "stopping now." I paraphrase.
• The world will be holding its breath tomorrow as our other EVA man, Dr. Steve Robinson, goes outside and underneath the shuttle. In the revised plan, he will do a little cleanup operation to the tile area, hoping to assure that the return to earth is as problem free as the collective space programs can make it. In a move to assure us that he will be very careful, he made it plain during the press conference that "there will be no yanking" of the two infamous "protruding gap filler" ceramic cloth pieces. I was relieved to find out that these fillers are inserted to keep tiles from unduly bumping together during the buffetting of the assent phase only. The cloth fragments have no vital thermal protection function during hot re-entry, but they could present a problem if they heat too much due to their excess protrusion. Phew! I think I just exhaled.