The Moon
So - Discovery made it back okay! I was watching the landing with bated breath this morning. I felt quite nervous watching it, which was weird, but I kept thinking back to the last time I tried to watch the shuttle land on TV and those glowing white rocks shooting through the sky like shooting starts, that were actually chunks of the shuttle that had broken up on re-entry into the atmosphere. I think the most memorable and haunting memory I have of the disaster (which I'm sure is the same for most people) was the photo on the front of the Times Newspaper a couple of days later of an Astronauts helmet lying in a field in Texas where it had landed from the sky. I can still see that picture so vividly now if I think about it.
But today was a much happier occasion and everything went 'A Okay'! Again the ridiculous speed that thing travels at amused me, with the Mission Control dude saying "225 miles from landing strip, travelling at 6,576 miles per hour" - SLOW DOWN! You'll miss the run way if you don't slow down! But they obviously knew what they were doing! Someone did make a sexist comment about it being a woman driver, then someone else (Female) commented that there would be no problem, as you don't have to reverse Shuttles!
To tie in with my the Space theme of this post, click HERE to visit Google Moon! Yes, that's right - good ol' Google have got satellite maps of the Moon on their Google Satellite Maps site now. Make sure you zoom right in as far as you can (using the zoomer thing on the top left) to see the moon's surface in AMAZING detail!