Astronaut Pam Melroy prepares for launch

Astronaut Pam Melroy has already flown two shuttles to space.  She served as shuttle pilot in 2000, and again in 2002.  For her next trip, she'll serve as commander.  Six months into training for the mission, Maureen McGuire travelled to Houston to watch Pam in action.  There's a personal connection after all.  Pam and Maureen were classmates at Bishop Kearney High School in Rochester.  Maureen's been reporting on her career at NASA ever since her rookie flight.  But Pam's rookie days are long over.  Pam is now the second woman ever to lead a NASA space mission.  She's in charge of a crew of 6 astronauts, including pilot George Zamka.  One of the robotics tasks the two practice at Johnson Space Center takes place in a simulator called the Dome.  Pam says, "We have this boom that has a sensor at the end of it so that we can look at all our thermal protection systems, the leading edge of the wings, the tile and so forth, to make sure they're in good shape, and we use the robotic arm to move it around."

The task is a recent addition to space flight procedure.  In 2003, the space shuttle Columbia exploded, killing the entire crew of seven.  NASA found that overheated tiles led to the explosion.  Inspection in space is now mandatory.  But the hardest part of Pam's job isn't what happens in space, it's what happens before she gets there.  "I want to do it safely," she says.  "I spend a lot of time thinking about crew escape scenarios and how to keep ourselves safe and if we get into a bad situation what are we going to do.  And so that's a big part of something I'm maybe a little more focused on than I was on my first flight, partly because of the responsibility and partly because of Columbia."

Pam lives about two miles from the Johnson Space Center, which is a good thing, because between now and launch, she'll spend most of her time in training.  "Most of the time I just feel sorry for my family that I'm doing this to them because I know it's hard," she says.  That means preparing to separate from loved ones, including her husband in Houston and her parents and her two brothers and their families in Rochester.  "The hardest part for me is to shed everything else," Pam says, "and you really do, you have to shed other things, you have to shed a lot of responsibilities.  I have volunteer work that I do with the community and other things that I'm used to on a regular basis, even my gym time has dropped a little bit, so I have a tendency to keep trying to sqeeze all that stuff in and so for me, that's the hardest part, is trying to juggle how to get rid of all that stuff so I have enough time to study." 

Inside the Dome, Pam's trainer forces a failure of a particular mechanism.  Pam's job is to contain the error, and fix it.  Her goal is to come across everything in training, so she's not surprised by anything in space.  "Columbia didn't change my perception of the risk at all," she says.  "For me, I think I just figured out about myself that this is what I was meant to do, and I wouldn't be happy if I weren't doing it."

For more information on Pam Melroy and NASA, click here.