Her Majesty Visits GSFC

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip graced GSFC with a visit today May 8th. The visit began at a control center in Building 13 (Marker B on this map) with a video conference with three astronauts on the Space Station (American Suni Williams and two Russians) with British-born astronaut Michael Foale standing next to the Queen acting as a go between. For some reason the Queen never directly addressed the astronauts on the Station. The Queen then left Building 13 and walked along Road No. 5 past thousands of star-struck GSFC employees to the official welcoming ceremony in the Building 8 Auditorium (Marker A). About 250 GSFC employees, including yours truly, were selected by lottery to attend. The ceremony began with dozens of children from the GSFC Child Development Center singing "It's A Small World". They looked very cute in their GCDC T-shirts. The youngsters were remarkably well behaved considering they had to sit quietly for more than an hour. The actual ceremony was rather brief. The high point was Sen. Mikulski and Rep. Hoyer giving the Queen a framed image taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. The Queen did not address the audience. On the way out NASA Administrator Mike Griffin described to the Queen the important features of the freshly mounted posters on the walls. Next stop was a tree planting ceremony at the GSFC Visitor Center (Marker C).

A highlight of the morning was watching the astronauts chat with each other on NASA TV before the Queen arrived. After a minute or so Michael Foale announced that he was going to say "over" when he was finished talking (because there was a delay of several seconds on the video link). The astronauts then proceeded to demonstrate their unfamiliarity with this standard protocol for the next 15 minutes. (Perhaps this is why the Queen never directly addressed the astronauts in the Space Station.) After a couple of minutes Foale said that it looked like the three astronauts could be in a 1-g environment here on Earth (ignoring Suni's hair) and asked them to do something to show that they were in space. Without any hesitation each of the three did a graceful somersault as if this were the most natural thing in the world. Suni is an interesting character -- she ran the Boston Marathon while on the Station. She was mostly on message, but also hinted that 5 months is a long time to be on the Station.