With the Juno and GRAIL patches under our belt, we are now poised for the release of our Press To MECO documentary. We will then be redesigning a few things website related and also releasing a calendar for 2012 as well as some posters too. Busy times, but fun as always. 
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MS2 Nate here -
A few days ago, I was approached by a good friend and fellow space enthusiast who had attended the NASA Tweetup for the launch of Juno last week on its journey to Jupiter. He was looking for a patch design for the group that would be unique to the event and pay tribute to both the mission and those who attended the liftoff. Here’s what we came up with!
A full description and high-resolution image is available here – http://maxqent.com/main.php?q=portfolio-juno-tweetup.html
CDR Brian here again, this is a shot I took last night showing the moon out on my back deck. Not much totally special as far as the moon itself, but this is the first session with the moon that I have had since moving into this house which I own outright. It was pretty cool to nail the shot with such clarity on the first try. We’ll see if I cant top it in the coming days . til then, happy shooting. 
Brian here (CDR), it’s that time again, time to release our post mission review video (MRV) for STS-135. It has been a very interesting 4 1/2 years that we have been in association with nasaspaceflight.com and through the highs and lows, we seem to always look back with pride at what we have done. Be it our photography gracing the news articles posted on the front page, photos and video clips in L2, or what got us our start, the MRV, everything has been a fantastic voyage.
I will echo the thoughts of our MS2 Nathan by saying that, this will not by any means mark the end of us doing videos, or the end of photographic coverage of both space and other things, but merely a chance for us to catch our breath before the next space adventure begins. Whether it ends up being a NASA project or SpaceX, Dreamchaser, or something entirely unheard of thus far, we will be here waiting. Fair winds dear shuttles, you have served your country proudly.
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=26178.msg783046#new
Steven (MS1) here… wanting to speak about the Space Shuttle Program on an early morning after work.
I’d like to thank all the tens of thousands of engineers who have worked on ALL of the Orbiters, whether it was Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis or Endeavour. They all played key roles in the success of the program. It was because of them that we still have three pristine girls going to three museums. I won’t comment on the losses of Challenger and Columbia, however I hope the two crews are resting in peace. They gave their life doing exactly what they wanted.
I have been lucky to attend two launches in person, and there is nothing more exhilarating than that. Seeing the brightness of the boosters rise over the pad is blinding, but if you blink, you miss a lot. Let the SRBs burn your retinas, for you will forever see that launch when you close your eyes. I can still look back to STS-129, my first launch, and tell you what the sky looked like, what was said right after liftoff, and how floored I was. I can do the same for STS-133 with Discovery. I was unable to attend an Endeavour liftoff, however she still holds a very special place in my heart.
I’m surprisingly not nearly as sad as I was when Discovery launched or touched down, having tears down my cheeks during both events. Is that simply because I was there in person to see her off, and knowing this was the beginning of the end when she touched down? I’m not sure. I’m looking at the end of the SSP in the way that it has ended, but look at what we’ve gotten out of it. The ISS… Hubble… quite a few satellites that help us every day; Chandra, Magellan, just to name two.
USA flew all sorts of people on board – didn’t matter whether you were African-American or Caucasion… whether you were American, Hispanic, Russian, English, Chinese, Japanese… all that mattered was that you were human. That’s why the ISS is INTERNATIONAL. It’s a great building block in Space, and we needed this to be able to move back to the Moon and Mars for long duration flights. The ISS does a lot of research, not only on how people react to long duration flights in space, but also for a lot of common things, such as cancer research. Maybe a treatment will only be found in Space, rather than on the ground? One day we might know, but had the Shuttle program not help to build the ISS, maybe we would never know.
My emotions are mixed…. I’m going to miss these orbiters, I truly will… however, they speak so loudly, even when they aren’t saying a word. Their history should pave a way for our future, and we should never forget all who flew aboard the Shuttles, on Apollo, and the test flights to get us to where we are.
I’ll end my thoughts there…. God Bless the USA.
Hail Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour.
Out doing a shoot for a friend at his new house, and we get the call of sirens sounding over by his current residence. Sure enough once we got back everything was still blocked off. Having just gotten a new toy 9 hours earlier (Canon 7D) it was obvious I needed some stick time. What better place.
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After the final shuttle landing ever, Brian Papke (CDR) and Nathan Moeller (MS2) will head to Johnson Space Center, and Ellington Field, for the STS-135 crew welcome home ceremony. It will be a welcomed get away for both, but the trip is not all play and no work. We will be completing work on the STS-135 Mission Review Video, as well as continuing work on our documentary PRESS To MECO. Both of these can be seen on NASASpaceflight.com in the coming weeks. Photos and HD Video will be taken at the welcome home, as well as at the Lone Star Flight Museum in Galveston as well as a couple other planned stops.
