It's really kind of a challenge to keep coordinated with the two station crews that we'll be interacting with. And of course one of them launched quite some time before our mission.
From Linda M. Godwin
It's very important to know that we packed it right because it is a safety issue for coming home.
The training comes to us with the benefit of what has gone before.
We're on the same radius from the Earth, and then we start to swing around to where we're ahead of them on the velocity vector, so we come in relative to the station from this forward velocity position and dock on to the forward end of the Lab.
Although I know a lot of the previous shuttle flights, in theory, had their tasks laid out; but there were still some changes that came along for them.
In the Astronaut Office we're never totally out of training, we always keep our hand in it. But after five years, things have changed and so it's been good to get back into the flow and relearn a lot of things.
It definitely helps to have been through the arm training flow before and to have used the arm on orbit, and it also gives me the confidence to know that our training facilities are really good, that when you get up there, you feel like you've been there.
Our shuttle crew is four people, because we're going to transfer a crew up to station, so all the jobs are divided between four people rather than five or six people. So it's been busy.
There's a lot of interest from the medical community on how things develop in microgravity, and the hope, later, that is expected to apply to what the changes are in humans as well.
We still have a lot of international partner modules that need to get up there to make it truly the international structure that it will be, and that's highly important; we need to get to where the crew size is bigger.
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