14 DAY TRIAL // President Barack Obama has made a very long distance-call on Tuesday, when he made contact with the joint 10-member crew of astronauts currently aboard the International Space Station and the Discovery space shuttle. The President, who has called the crew from his Oval Office, has said, first of all, that everyone at the White House is very proud of the Americans in the group, but has emphasized that international cooperation is the future of such ambitious scientific projects.
“The first thing we want to do is just to let you know how proud we are of you. We are extremely excited about the project that you're doing,” Obama has told all the 10 astronauts, gathered around in the ISS, during their last hours together, before Discovery departs for the Kennedy Space Center. Once the hatches are closed later today, the shuttle will undock from the station and head for its Saturday landing date.
“We're investing, back here on the ground, in a whole array of solar and other renewable energy products, so to find out that you're doing this up at the space station is particularly exciting,” Obama has added, referring to the fact that the STS-119 mission crew members managed to successfully deploy the last set of American-built solar panels to the $100-billion International Space Station on Friday. It was a tense moment, but everything went according to plan and the wings unfurled smoothly.
The President has also said that the ISS is one of the best examples of how people working together can achieve something remarkable. At this point, he has stressed, there are astronauts from the US, Russia, and Japan on the station, which means that the 16 nations that have contributed to the project are finally starting to rip the benefits. “This really symbolizes the future of the scientific development of the world and I'm just happy to be part of it,” Koichi Wakata, who has replaced NASA astronaut aboard the ISS, shares.
“It's pretty impressive what human beings can do when work together constructively and not destructively, and that's what our mission is at the International Space Station. Thanks for flying with us,” ISS commander Michael Fincke points out. “Overall, we're absolutely thrilled and we're very happy that we were able to accomplish what we did. We certainly accomplished our highest priority objectives, and certainly the ones that we were most concerned about were executed flawlessly without problems,” NASA's lead station flight director for the Discovery mission, Kwatsi Alibaruho, concludes.