
I bought Sara’s Halloween costume LONG before the STS-129 NASA Tweetup was even announced, much less before I knew I was going to be one of the lucky attendees. I could have bought her an International Space Station or even a Project Constellation / Ares flight suit (the latter, of course, doesn’t even exist yet since it’s a long way from manned spaceflights), but the Space Shuttle is what I grew up with and I will always have a very special place in my heart for the Space Transportation System (STS) and the orbiter in particular.
Even with, or perhaps even because of, the Space Shuttle program slowly winding down (heavy sigh), I wanted her flight suit to be a memento/keepsake not just a Halloween costume–a reminder that when she was *imagine holding up the flight suit* “only this big” the Space Shuttle was still flying and building out the International Space Station.
Anyway, the moment my husband Justin (@bikegeek) took that photo of her I knew it was a keeper. It’s going to end up as a canvas wrap art print on our wall at home (it would already be there, if not for my expenditures to attend the tweetup!) and, naturally, when I discovered I was one of the lucky attendees it became the photo I featured on my contact/business cards–all of which I ended up handing out to people at the NASA Tweetup or elsewhere during my stay in Florida for the Tweetup.
And it ended up on my luggage tags and my desktop wallpaper, too.
So, naturally, it was perfect when I was approached during the (crazy-busy but awesome) launch day activities inside the STS-129 NASA Tweetup tent by @skytland who wanted to feature Justin’s photo of Sara in an article on OpenNASA.com, a collaborative blog written by NASA employees across the agency, and occasional invited guests. The article, “It’s Better in Person,” is terrific and it’s an honor to see our beautiful daughter’s photo featured in it!
A high resolution copy of the photo is available on Flickr via a Creative Commons-Attribution-ShareAlike license, which means anyone can use it for pretty much any purpose as long as they credit my husband Justin with the photo — Justin W. Moore / @bikegeek / Moore Photography & Design are all options, with the preference being his name plus one of the other items.
And thus, our already amazing and wonderful daughter is shared with the world in a most wonderful way–helping to advance the quest for space and the expansion of human knowledge. It doesn’t get any better than that. Wait, it does…seeing a Space Shuttle launch in person with 100+ amazing people? Indescribably perfect. Thank you so much, NASA!