Atlantis, Real and Simulated

First of all, welcome to any first time visitors who arrived here for the Carnival of Space or from various sites that linked to it. There's a lot of space-related educational material here (among other things), so I hope you will take a look around and tell me what you think.

This week I've been practicing docking the shuttle Atlantis with the International Space Station (ISS) - simulated in Orbiter, of course. This is preparation for Saturday's Space Expo 2007 at the New England Air Museum at Bradley Airport, near Hartford, CT. I've got a scenario set up to allow visitors to dock either Atlantis (docking port is "up") or the fictional Deltaglider (docking port is in the nose, easier to do) from 10 meters out using a joystick (not really needed, but more fun than the numeric keypad). If this is too easy for some people, I can make it harder pretty quickly even from 10 meters out.

This will be especially cool for two reasons. If all goes well and the launch takes place Friday evening as planned, the real Atlantis (STS-117) will be in orbit (though not docking until flight day 3). Plus astronaut Winson Scott will be at the Space Expo in person, talking about his real shuttle flight experience (and giving Orbiter a try, I hope).

P.S. If you want a lot of information on STS-117 or other shuttle misisons or ISS expeditions at your fingertips, check out shuttlepresskit.com and download a PDF press kit. The STS-117 press kit PDF is 5.8 megabytes.