THE HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT BLOG: From the Space Shuttle to Beyond

YESTERDAY, music artist will.i.am, who’s a member of the hip hop group The Black Eyed Peas, was on-hand at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida to watch the launch of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission to the Red Planet. MSL lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station near KSC on Saturday morning, and will arrive at Mars sometime in early August of next year. Will.i.am was at KSC as a member of the latest NASA Tweetup...which is a special get-together in which the space agency invites a maximum of 150 Twitter users to a launch and/or a NASA-sponsored event. (I personally was able to attend a NASA Tweetup at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, California last June. It was awesome.) In the image below, will.i.am is taking a tour of the Operations and Checkout Building (O&C) in the KSC Industrial Area. The O&C will be the site where Lockheed Martin conducts final assembly on the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle before launch.

And who said space exploration was uncool?


NASA / Jim Grossmann