What does your Username mean?

Norg. the first part of my last name. Well before it got chopped down at Ellis Island way back in the day when my great grandparents traveled here. Short and simple. lol

If it makes you feel any better Cheryl I always thought you were a woman as well. Haha.

 

haha thats funny. I did too...

 

I worked for NASA as a Space Shuttle Experiment engineer for nearly 10 years. When I started playing the first MMO real time game (Air Warrior - a WWII flight sim) in the early 90s I needed a handle and 'Rocketman' seemed to fit. Since 'Rocketman' is typically taken in most games, forums, etc., I append my initials to the end and it's usually available.

One of the last things I did while I was there was a virtual tour of the orbiter Columbia. The link doesn't appear to be working right now, but hopefully it will come back.

 

Thats awesome! What kinda stuff did you do there?

 

My Screen name is my first name, and one of my avid hobbies.

I'm an avid beach catamaran sailor/racer. Thus Todd_Sails.

Often people think it's my last name, and that's OK too.

 

Cool picture!

 

For the record, I have always thought you were/are a woman lol. I am in fact a dude, and on other forums get mistaken as a female all the time. Kind of annoying lol. ;D

 

There is a story behind mine lol. In high school I ran track. I weighed around 100 pounds at 5'8", so I was a bean pole lol. My track coach started calling my "stick" back in 1997 and the name has stuck with me ever since. My last name is smith. I started a yahoo email account when I was 23, so I went with sticksmith23. Now I use sticksmith23 for just about everything, but recently switched over smitty_1280 because I am more commonly called smitty now and I was born on December 30th.

 

Basically any scientific experiment that flew on the shuttle my group assembled it onto the carrier, tested and removed after the flight. These included experiments that were exposed in the orbiter's cargo bay, flew in a space lab or were flown in one of the "locker" spaces in the orbiter middeck.

In the latter two, when time sensitive materials or life science stuff had to be loaded we'd go out to the pad anywhere from 13 to 18 hours before launch and put the stuff on board. When the orbiter landed, we were the second truck in the convoy - the first went in to get the crew out and we were the second to get the life science experiments out and to the experimenters as quickly as possible.

Definitely fun while I was there. I worked on every orbiter except Challenger (before my time) and worked on a bunch of missions. The most memorable:

STS-31 (Hubble and my first - didn't do much except babysit it at the pad on 3rd shift)
STS-38 (Last DOD mission and the only use of my Secret clearance)
STS-45 (ATLAS-1 - I led a team that reduced damage during processing of this payload by 98%)
STS-47 (Spacelab J - my first work in a Spacelab - if I remember correctly, this was the mission where they had two goldfish with electrodes attached to their brains)
STS-55 (Spacelab D2 - met a lot of fun Germans on that one)
STS-73 (USML-2 - I was the primary experiment astronaut trainer - Cady Coleman baked us cookies!)
STS-78 (LMS - my last full integration mission)
STS-90 (Neurolab - the last time I was on board an orbiter - Columbia)

 

So very cool! That is so exciting. Not many people get a job like that one lol. ;D