Updated: Sun Nov. 15 2009 2:57:25 PM
ctvottawa.ca

Elizabeth Howell, a web reporter from CTV Ottawa, flies to Florida Sunday night for a special meeting of Twitter space geeks at Monday's scheduled launch of space shuttle Atlantis. Follow her journey on Twitter at @howellspace and check her website, elizabethhowell.ca, for updates.

Shuttles and social media

I did a double-take when a message from NASA appeared in my e-mail on Oct. 7. Yet when I closed and opened my eyes, the message was still there: "We want to invite you to the STS-129 tweetup."

What's a 'tweetup'? Well, the people who use the social networking site Twitter send short 140-character messages to each other called 'tweets'. If a bunch of these tweeters have a meeting, it's called a 'tweetup', which is fancy shortening of the word 'Twitter meetup'.

The point being, NASA wanted me -- a space geek since watching the movie Apollo 13 at age 13 -- to go down and watch the launch of space shuttle Atlantis Nov. 16 on mission STS-129, simply because I was passionate about the subject and tweet about it.

And I would get to hang out with 100 fellow tweeters who feel the same way.

Showing the public the press site

With the traditional 'pool' of shuttle reporters shrinking lately through layoffs, NASA has been pushing hard into Twitter and Facebook, uploading pictures on photo site Flickr, and even providing behind-the-scenes videos of shuttle training to appeal directly to the public themselves.

Bringing the public on the press site is different. The bleachers and countdown clock are usually reserved for professional journalists. NASA's Beth Beck says it took some negotiating with security personnel at the Kennedy Space Center to bring ordinary folk onto there, but in the end she feels it will be worth it.

"Our initial plan was to bring in bloggers and to create this new community to move with the times, because we are recognizing that newspapers and journalists are all changing," she says.

A million followers

But when Hubble Space Telescope repair astronaut Mike Massimino opened up his own Twitter account in April -- and quickly reached more than a million followers -- NASA realized Twitter had a powerful pull of its own.

Hence the invitations and, for the most part, first-come-first-served website registration for 100 people to come. The registration late last month closed in only 20 minutes. Tweeters are coming from 21 states and five countries outside the United States. (I'm the sole one from Canada).

NASA estimates the tweeters have a collective 'following' of 150,000 people -- a built-in audience for an agency that loves publicity, especially with the younger crowd that tends to use Twitter.

A mission of spare parts

Space shuttle Atlantis will launch with a payload-bay full of spare parts for the International Space Station.

Unfortunately, a urine recycler that broke this week won't get repaired this time around as it broke after the shuttle was loaded and ready to go on the launch pad.

Astronauts will conduct three spacewalks to install these parts and also to put on a system called GATOR (Grappling Adaptor To On-Orbit Railing) to install receivers similar to those used by the Coast Guard to identify ships, their destination and their cargo on satellites.

Twitternauts

Two of the six astronauts will be tweeting in between these duties:

• Bobby Satcher, an orthopedic surgeon. He's talking about the mission at @Astro_Bones and about medical issues for space exploration at @ZeroG_MD.
• Leland Melvin, a mission specialist, will talk about his experiences on orbit at @Astro_Flow.

The launch is supposed to happen Monday at 2:28 p.m. Weather is 90 per cent "go" and there are no outstanding mechanical issues, NASA officials say, and they expect high media interest from the two-day tweetup.

"Bringing someone in who's never been to a launch - it's life changing, so that's a thrill for me," says Beck. "Even though it's a pain and hard to co-ordinate and you're paying your own money to get down there . . . but once it launches, it's something special."