This day actually began the night before at about 10pm after eating dinner with my Family. My Dad, my Sister and I packed the car double checked to make sure we didn’t leave anything behind and set off on a 10 hour car ride to Florida. I volunteered to drive the first leg of our journey. After driving all the way to the Georgia border from Raleigh I decided that I had enough and turned the wheel over to my Sister to drive the rest of the way. Unfortunately I could not fall asleep in the passengers seat due to the fact that I was so excited to get down to Cape Canaveral and meet all of my fellow Twitter friends!
I made it to the registration area a little early so the people setting up kindly allowed me to sit around and talk to them while they set up everything. After about 30 minutes the building began to get packed. I verified that I was indeed myself by showing them numerous forms of identification. I received my ‘tweetup’ credentials and a ‘swag bag’ which gave me something to tweet about while I awaited the arrival of my fellow tweeting Raleigh team.
Once the others from Raleigh arrived and verified their information we car pooled to the tweetup tent. On the way to the tent we first came up on one of the biggest buildings I have ever seen in my life; the NASA VAB. After being completely mesmerized for about a minute we arrived at the press area, which is where our tent was set up. Walking to the tent we passed all of the news buildings on our right and the famous countdown clock/flag on our left.
Once inside the tweetup tent we found a free table and started to setup our tweeting equipment while the rest of the tweeters arrived. We were allowed to walk around the press area and take as many pictures/videos as we desired; which we did! Also, this was a great opportunity to meet some of the people in person that I have been talking to only before the event. After everyone got settled down a couple of speakers came in and talked to our group. I found this especially cool of NASA to allow these people to talk to us a day before the launch, I would imagine that they were very busy! The speakers included NASA’s Technology Director and an Astronaut.
After a short break for lunch we set out on 4 buses to tour the NASA facilities. This is the standard tour you get from NASA when you get a standard Kennedy Space Center pass (I’m guessing here). The advantage we had was not having to wait for the buses when done with the tours which was really nice. The one thing that stood out for me was the low quality video they had to preempt some of the tours. I realize they are going through some drastic budget cuts but I feel like high definition video would be a thing of value for their visitors. I am told however they do have some IMAX theatres on some of their tours. I didn’t have time to check those out, I’m sure they are awesome though!
When the tour of their facilities concluded we made a quick stop by the tent to pick up anything we may need for the next leg of the tour. Once on the buses again we headed out to the launch pad. I was surprised that one day before the launch they would allow us anywhere close to the pad. Getting to our designated spot I felt completely privileged to be that close to this giant space shuttle. We actually were there to watch the retraction of the Rotating Service Structure which took about 30 – 45 minutes to happen, but was totally worth waiting and watching!
That pretty much concluded my first day at the NASA tweetup! I concluded this with a late dinner with my Dad, Sister and Uncle on the water at the Crab Shack in Melbourne, FL and some much needed sleep after.
