I am a fifty-something unexpectedly single man residing about halfway between Houston and Galveston, Texas. I have worked at the Johnson Space Center for nearly 30 years. For the first 20-odd years I was a systems programmer on the IBM mainframes used to run NASA's Mission Control Center. I am currently responsible for the Linux operating system used to run the laptops aboard the International Space Station.
As we move forward from an era where the United States was the acknowledged leader in Human Space Flight technology, I have to ask how does the loss of the Space Shuttle impact the value of the International Space Station as a research facility?
Capsules are great as “space taxis†but where are you gonna go when you need to haul real cargo? Or when you need to get something bigger then an overnight bag back from orbit?
Shuttle yes, Soyuz nyet!
I currently divide my computing resources between the SETI and the Rosetta projects.
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.
