Yeah. We have NASA TV here in CT whenever there's a space mission going on. You get to see everything they're doing live. It's pretty cool !
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Boy those guys are smart to build it, launch it, dock it, fix it and fly it back home again ... good job NASA.
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You don't know the half of it.
Try flying a perfect mission in the shuttle using the Orbiter Spaceflight Simulator
, or even better (but you pay for it) in Space Shuttle Mission 2007. That will really REALLY get you seeing how smart they are.
Flying the shuttle is like flying a freakin' brick and just getting the orbits right, not to mention rendevou and dockings done, takes a LOT of skill (and practice). Then landing the thing and getting it to actually come down at the right angle and speed to get it to be where you want it to be when you land it. That's a whole new ball game.
(As a side note, if anyone is interested in these sims, PM me. I can give you the lowdown
. Space Shuttle Mission 2007 is easy to point to but Orbiter will take some explaining.)
The following is for those people interested in trying these space sims who havn't tried them yet. Orbiter is free and open sourced.
Space Shuttle Mission 2007 (I've played the demo of this and it's amazing. It models every single button and knob in that flight deck and they all work. It doesn't get more hardcore than this. I watched the build of this as they went and still have a copy of the original in progress demo. The guys working on it had some SERIOUS behind the scenes help from some NASA people and it was amazing the data they had access to. This new version makes the in progress demo that I have look like Pac Man.)
http://www.space-shuttle-mission.com/
As I said.. for Orbiter, PM me. I can tell you what to download for it.
Here is the link to the main site.
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/orbit.html