Freddy Khan - March 22, 2002: Hooked up - Log for 8 Feb:

This week was spent meeting with the guys at the Education Resource Centre, the Space Centre in Houston, and helping get stuff for the guys in Star City. Cindy MacArthur, of the resource centre, heaped tons of content on me for the education programme and frantically made arrangements to ensure that no stone was unturned in my quest for material. Patricia Tribe, of the Space Centre, also availed all her resources to me. The amount of investment in money, time and effort that NASA invests towards education is truly amazing.

Karl called me, tasking me with procuring a certain headset for Mark. I thought that since I was literally in the heart of flight and air travel, this would be a piece of cake. Hours of phone calls and internet scouring later, I managed to get these headsets In … wait for it … Las Vegas. No kidding.

Similarly, the shaver that Mark needed for personal grooming on the ISS turned into another proverbial needle search. You would imagine that a recommended piece of equipment would actually be freely available. Turns out that only one, yes you got it, uno, shop in the whole of Houston had it. In fact, even the manufacturers themselves didn’t even know that this outlet stocked the product. I guess that after shopping in the Oriental Plaza in Fordsburg, I am pretty much qualified to shop and find anything, anywhere.

Prepared to travel to the Challenger Centre, and the Classroom of the Future, both based out of state. After doing the cost calculations for the related flights and car hires in the various places, it worked out much cheaper and logistically easier for me to drive the entire distance, about 3000 miles in total.

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