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.
I did grow up with a really big interest in math and science; I liked it.
I grew up watching a lot of the coverage of the early U.S. space program, all the way back starting with Mercury and then through Gemini and Apollo and of course going to the moon as the main part of the Apollo program.
We launch when we're kind of in the same orbit that they are in terms of being matched up in inclination in space, and we're just in a little different altitude.
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.
I'll be the person using the shuttle robotic arm.
We didn't use the shuttle robot arm before, so this has been a training flow to get ready for that.
We're taking up some science experiments, some crystal growth things, we have a refrigerator that carries up some samples, new samples that go into the station, we bring the old ones home; we have a lot of clothing, we have a lot of food-U.S. and Russian food.
It's very important to know that we packed it right because it is a safety issue for coming home.
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.
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Shannon Lucid Biochemist
