Crew includes Twittering skipper, singer, ER doc
CAPE CANAVERAL -- The astronauts headed to the international space station include a Twittering skipper, a classically trained musician who named her son after one of Columbia's fallen astronauts, and a former Navy SEAL who went into Afghanistan two weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Space shuttle Endeavour's motley crew of seven blasted off Wednesday. When they join the six residents at the space station on Friday, it will be the first time so many have been in orbit together. A brief look at each:
Commander Mark Polansky is about to become only the second astronaut to tweet from space.
Polansky — known as Astro—127 because of the mission number — has been posting Twitter updates for a couple of months. He's also seen on YouTube, making a pitch for questions he can answer during the flight.
He follows Michael Massimino, who provided brief Twitter messages during the May shuttle flight.
"I'll be the first to admit that I didn't know a tweet from a Twitter from a Facebook from MySpace before I got into this. But as I've done it, I've learned that there's a whole community of people who love this stuff," said Polansky, 53, a former Air Force pilot. "I hope that we draw a lot of people in."
Polansky, who's from Edison, N.J., will be making his third trip to the space station. He's been an astronaut since 1996. Before that, he was an engineer and research pilot for NASA.
He and wife Lisa, who used to work with flight crew equipment, have a 4-year-old daughter and a 2-year-old son.
Pilot Douglas Hurley helped strap in the seven astronauts who died aboard Columbia in 2003.
On Wednesday, it was his turn to climb aboard a space shuttle for liftoff.
"It's a risk business, that's just part of the job," the space rookie said. "I had to come to grips with that many, many, many years ago flying fighters and flying off aircraft carriers."
Following the accident, Hurley served on the Columbia reconstruction team. He said he never considered quitting NASA. Rather, his objective was "what can I do to make this business as safe as it can be?"
