Official Launch Date!

It's official!  The SpaceX 3 resupply launch that will carry our T-cells to the International Space Station has been moved to March 16th at the (very drowsy) time of 4:41 EST.  Check it out on NASA's launch schedule here.

L-32 days and counting!

Ready, set......

It is officially 2014 and we have heard from NASA that the SpaceX-3 launch date has been set to March 1st! We have already begun shipping supplies to Kennedy Space Center in anticipation of the launch and now that we know the date, the race is on.

Our lab had a "mission patch" designed for our project:








We now have to finalize our experimental schedule, book flights and lodging, etc before we leave for Florida. We will also continue to do ground and simulated microgravity studies in the meantime. We just completed an experiment using a desktop Random Positioning Machine (RPM), which uses two frames to rotate an object on the platform such that its gravity vector averages to 0.
(Photo courtesy of Dutch Space)

Oh gators, where art thou?

The Hughes-Fulford Lab is in Florida!
Specifically, we're in Cape Canaveral for a Facility Trial Run (FTR) at Kennedy Space Center. We have our own designated lab here, and it was much easier to send our supplies to than ESTEC in Noordwijk. In contrast to the Netherlands, Florida is extremely humid right now, with the occasional thunderstorm. We landed right before one yesterday but our luggage was delayed on the plane for more than 2 hours.


Today, we went through setting up the lab, albeit with a slight crisis in receiving the blood. Tomorrow we will go through a run to practice with and test the functionality of all the equipment here.

Hopefully, the day after, we will be able to go on a tour of KSC and see some gators! Haven't seen any yet, but there is a restaurant in Cocoa Beach that cooks gator, so maybe we'll settle for that...