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Julie Payette's Journal

L-2 days Kennedy Space Center, Florida
5:00 a.m. - Thursday, June 11, 2009

It is the middle of the night at Kennedy Space Center and most people in Florida are fast asleep, with the exception of night-shift workers, night birds and the crew of STS-127. It's five a.m. but for the mission crew it's really the afternoon of our workday. It's L-2. Two days before the launch.

I am writing from inside an aircraft called the STA (Shuttle Landing Aircraft). It is a small Gulfstream specifically modified so that astronauts can practice the Shuttle's final descent to a landing strip. The left side of the STA cockpit is identical to the Shuttle's control panel, and the right side of the cockpit looks just like an airplane's control panel (well, almost).

Astronauts who are being trained sit to the left of the pilot instructor, who flies the airplane to 20,000 feet over the ground. Once he configures the flaps, he then instructs the astronaut to take over the controls, and practice the final descent toward Kennedy Space Center's landing strip.

This landing strip is 4.5 km long and 100 m wide. It's so big, and its surface is so white and bright in contrast to the dark colors that surround it, that it is actually easily visible from space even to the naked eye. The Shuttle enters the atmosphere like a cannonball and lands without engines, just like a (poor) glider, so the commander has only one opportunity to "make" the landing strip, despite its great size. He cannot miss. That's why it is so important to practice the approach over and over, hundreds of times.

I had a chance to join my commander Mark Polansky on a two-hour landing simulation in the STA. It is very impressive to stand behind the flight engineer and feel the STA plummet from the sky toward the Earth. The plane dives toward the ground at a 20° angle (the dive angle is seven times steeper than on a commercial plane). The commander pulls up at 1,000 meters and then again at 100 meters. He lowers the landing gear ten seconds before landing, simulates the touchdown and then "hop", the instructor takes over and we start all over again. To get ready for this mission, my Commander and Pilot (Doug Hurley) did well over 2,000 of these practice STA dives.

Right after the STA, we jumped in one of our T38 jets to fly one last "conditioning" mission. In other words, we use the jet to pull G's and feel various levels of acceleration in order to prepare (condition) ourselves for weightlessness and eventual return to Earth. It is a bit of a brutal flight, but it works.

As we were heading back to land from this T38 flight, we flew over the coast of Florida, right over the town of Cocoa Beach where all my friends and colleagues from the Canadian Space Agency are staying. We flew low over the coast and I saw friends on the beach and hotel balconies. What a great way to say goodbye before the flight.