Can’t imagine working on the Hubble for all these days and then having your landing delayed. But that’s what’s happening today. The crew of STS-125 won’t be landing until tomorrow, due to weather conditions at Kennedy.

This has been one of the more eventful and high profile missions since the program returned to flight. I’m sure there are some experiments to work on, and there are worse things than a day off 350 miles in orbit. So tonight there will again be two sets of people working and sleeping in space. One set aboard the ISS, the other on Atlantis!

NASA has really embraced interactive media with this mission, and there have also been quite a few independent companies that have popped up to support public interest in the program. And then, of course, there’s “Astro” Mike Massimo’s twitter stream, which I imagine will be pretty lively today. I’ll see if I can get a movie review from him!

I always leave a TV on in my office tuned to NASA on launch and landing day. It’s a tradition I’ve kept up for 4 years now, and it’s kind of nice that I can do that online as well. The talking you may be hearing is live coverage from Mission Control. You can get this feed yourself from http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/status.html and you can shut it up by scrolling down a bit until you see the box with the talking people.

Here are the current landing opportunities for this weekend. KSC = Kennedy Space Center. EDW = Edwards Air Force Base, NOR, White Sands, New Mexico. Orbit = the number of times the ship has gone round. Looks like tomorrow morning is a good shot!

ORBIT…SITE…LANDING

Saturday, May 23:

180…..KSC….09:16 AM
181…..EDW….10:46 AM
181…..KSC….10:54 AM
182…..EDW….12:24 PM

Sunday, May 24:

196…..EDW….10:01 AM
196…..NOR….10:04 AM
196…..KSC….10:10 AM
197…..EDW….11:39 AM
197…..NOR….11:42 AM
197…..KSC….11:48 AM

I’ve noticed that there’s a marked “who cares” when it comes to shuttle missions that aren’t seen as dangerous. People like drama, and as far as the public is concerned, unless there’s a love triangle involved, NASA isn’t dramatic enough.

I think educators are missing something really big with mission STS-125 (HST-SM4). For one thing, the mission specialists are doing extended EVAs. That’s people spending actual days floating and working in space. Additionally, this is it for the shuttle program. It’s time to move on to new ship designs and, new destinations other than orbit. Well, not really new…

We’ve been to one of the destinations before.

So, while this mission isn’t sexy on the outside — it’s important!

Learn more — and share more — from NASA’s official mission website.