My first class on Monday was another hands-on class working the Shuttle computer network. We had more practice setting up and using the laptops. After that we had a class on solar science and low earth orbit. The basic gist of the class was to talk about what the sun does (solar flares, solar wind, radiation, etc.) and the effect it can have on a person. In reality, the effects of the radiation that an astronaut gets is not fully understood - there just has not been enough data through the years for many definitive answers. There are some protection measures, though, if the ground knows a big solar flare is heading towards the Earth and people are in orbit, ground will tell the crew to stay in a certain parts of the Station which provide more radiation protection. Or, if there is a spacewalk scheduled when the solar flare is due to hit the earth's atmosphere then the spacewalk will be postponed. One interesting effect that the crews have reported is that when their eyes are closed, they often see flashes of light. This is from the cosmic rays that are constantly bombarding the earth's atmosphere. Pretty nifty, if you ask me.

After a trip to the gym, I started my Tuesday with a Russian class. The afternoon was taken up with a simulator session in the full up Shuttle simulator. For this particular class, we were flying entry profiles with a variety of initial conditions. The purpose of the class was to get a feel for how the Shuttle software manages energy - how it trades how high you are for how fast you need to be going. On the last run, I was flying the Shuttle from the pilot's seat. This was a run where basically everything was going wrong and you had to fly the Shuttle manually with limited cues. So, I was doing my best to use the heading indicator and the attitude indicator and all the while trying to keep the Shuttle within its limits so we do not lose control. Towards the end of an entry, the profile has the Shuttle go around a circle to lose energy. The entry profile is always planed to be started with more energy than you actually need to get to the landing strip, just to be sure that you will make it. At any rate, I am trying to fly around the circle by the instruments and I hear from the person in the commander's seat that we were passing the runway. I glance up out the window and do not see it. I ask where and am told that it is right there. Well, maybe in the commander's view it was "right there." It certainly was not in my view. Let's just say that by the time I sorted out where the runway was, we were a little low. I MAY have clipped a few buildings on my way in. I guess the lesson for the future is to not have two mission specialists flying the Shuttle while the only pilot in the group is sitting in the back where he can not see out the window. . .

Wednesday was a full day. The morning was taken up with a class on what is called "Entry Digital Auto Pilot." This class was more on how the Shuttle software works during an entry. Instead of focusing on how the software is managing the energy, this class was on how the software interacts with the aerosurfaces and jets, i.e., how the energy management is implemented. Because of the non-traditional shape and the supersonic speeds of the Shuttle, the aerosurfaces do not work like regular airplanes. In some cases, they move exactly opposite to how they would on an airplane. Interesting stuff.

As soon as the class was over, I dashed out to Ellington for a T-38 flight. I flew with one of the instructor pilots. As I mentioned, we went out to the working area over the Gulf and did aerobatics. Needless to say, it was a lot of fun. At one point, we decided to practice some high-g turns. The pilot started into a 4-g turn. I was either not ready or out of practice with my anti-g loss of consciousness procedures because almost immediately everything went black. I could see the sides of my vision collapse down. I was able to tell the pilot that everything was going black. The neat thing was that even though I lost sight, I could still hear what was going on. He stopped the maneuver and I was back to normal. I never completely passed out. The pilot felt badly that that had happened to me, but I just thought it was interesting. It is good to experience to know how well you are keeping up with high g-s and it is always good to practice your anti-g procedures. You never know when you might need them.

After flying, I dashed back to JSC for a single systems trainer class on malfunctions in the environmental control system during launches and landings. This was another evaluated class. Seems like all our single systems trainer classes these days are evaluated. For this class we covered various scenarios of leaks of atmosphere out of the cabin and leaks of water or freon in the cooling systems or a fire back where the equipment is located. None of it was too difficult, but you do have to keep track of things to know how to prioritize your work when lots of things are breaking at one time. Plus you have to keep up with the effects of leaks in your cooling systems - equipment is going to get hot. Some equipment is more important than others, especially on a launch. So, you need to know what to take care of immediately and what can wait.

Thursday morning our class had a briefing from some of the scientists that track and study solar radiation. They were going through a lot of the science of how things are measured and what radiation happens where - what the atmosphere stops and what it doesn't. It was a very, very technical briefing - probably more technical that we really needed. I stayed through most of the briefing and then left before it was over to go fly. I do not think I missed much by leaving early. No blackouts during this flight. I think the most interesting thing that we did was a simulated Shuttle main engine cutoff. For this we start out in a 3-g turn. We turned and turned and turned for several minutes to simulate what the g's are like during a launch. When we are approaching the time that the main engines will shut off, we scaled back the amount of g's that we were experiencing to simulate the throttling back of the Shuttle engines (they throttle back to about 67%), and then we nosed over into a zero-g dive to simulate when the engines cut off and you are in space. What a hoot !

After flying, I went back to JSC for a Russian lesson. At the end of the day, our class played a group of co-ops (NASA has a "work-study" program with many schools where students can work at NASA for a semester each year while they are working on their degree) in a game of ultimate frisbee. I was not familiar with this game - but it turns out it is sort of like football with a frisbee. Let's just say, the co-ops won by a large margin. I did not think it was that bad of a game, considering the vast majority of our class had never played it before. Unfortunately, I was not able to play. It turns out that last week, when I was playing soccer, I injured one of my hamstrings. I first thought I had just pulled a muscle. But, eventually, I was forced to admit that it was not just a muscle pull, since the injury was not healing up like a pulled muscle. The trainers are now working with me to help my hamstring heal properly and they have adjusted my usual weight lifting regime so that I do not re-injure myself. The downside to all of this is that I can not play soccer or run or do anything like that for about six weeks. Sigh. Let me tell you, riding a recumbent bike in the gym just is not as enjoyable as playing soccer. But, it beats having a re-injured hamstring.

I had my third T-38 flight of the week first thing Friday morning. This pilot had a fun challenge - anytime I messed up on anything that I was responsible for I owed him a coke. And, conversely, anytime he made a mistake, he owed me a coke. We agreed on what kinds of things were "cokeable" and set out on our flight. He also had me start the engines and taxi just to see what it was like. I had never done that before. And, he also had me hold the brakes as we cranked up the engines before we took off. As we were going through the pre-brief he told me that I was going to need to stomp on the breaks just as hard as I possibly could. And, when I thought I was pressing them hard enough, I needed to press even harder. Boy, was he right. I had the brakes jammed on just as hard as I possibly could and we were still rolling forward slightly. I had no idea it took so much to hold the breaks on.

When we got out to the working area, we did lots of different aerobatic maneuvers. He talked me through flying all of them - I ended up flying high-g turns, all kinds of dives, split-s's, and wingovers. He also talked me through flying a loop in which we pulled about 5 g's. Man, was that a blast. Although, when the g's get high, my helmet smooshes down and I cannot see a thing. He was telling me to look back over my head for the horizon and all I could see was the inside of my helmet. Good thing we were really, really high above the water. . . When we got back to Ellington, we had planned to do some touch and go's. After our second pass, the light in the landing gear handle did not go out when we tried to raise our landing gear. The light should go out when the gear is up. Hmmm. . .guess we broke the plane with all our high-g maneuvering. . . Since we did not know the status of our landing gear, we called the tower and our operations folks and asked them to take a look as we did a low approach over the field. They reported back to us that our landing gear was down. It had not come up at all. So, moved the handle to the down position, got all the proper indications that it was down, and we landed. Turns out that there was a switch in one of the landing gear doors that was not reading properly and it was preventing the gear from moving up. Whew! We had not broken the plane after all. Oh, the score of the coke challenge was 1-1. He got me on missing a call on telling him when we were 1000 feet before our assigned altitude (pretty sneaky, if you ask me, it was a call that needed to be made right at takeoff when I was talking to the tower). But, when I was doing some of the flying, he did not initiate the descent checklist. Ha! All in all, a great flight!

Back at the ranch, I had another evaluated single systems trainer class. This one was on the operations of the inertial measurement units. The final class for the day was another one on the entry digital auto pilot. This class dealt with taking the theoretical knowledge that we had in the class earlier in the week and transforming it into skills that you would use to fly the Shuttle. We'll see if I can avoid hitting buildings the next time I try and land the Shuttle.