I’m Going To A NASA Social!

I’m extremely excited to announce that my application has been accepted for the NASA Social being held November 18th and 19th at the Armstrong Flight Research Center, located at Edwards Air Force Base!

For those not familiar with the NASA Social programs, they are structured as a mini-conference of a day, sometimes two, aimed at bringing news about NASA programs and events to social media. Typically they have thirty to forty participants, all of whom are selected based on their ability to reach a wide audience through Twitter, Facebook, their blogs, and so on. A NASA Social for a launch of some sort will generally also include press site access to watch the launch. A NASA Social at a NASA research facility will highlight key programs being worked on at that facility, usually with a tie-in to some prominent event associated with that program.

The NASA Social for the Armstrong Flight Research Center will include presentations on programs being developed to benefit commercial aviation, such as the Automatic Ground-Collision Avoidance System (“lithobraking” is bad!) and the Adaptive Compliant Trailing Edge flexible wing flap project, which is looking at making the next generation of commercial airliners more efficient while also making them less noisy. If you watch NASA-TV with any regularity (and if you aren’t, why aren’t you?) you will have seen short documentaries about these and other projects out of Armstrong.

So in two weeks, I’ll be getting a metric ton of pictures and information to write about here (I take a LOT of pictures!), as well as posting updates and pictures on FaceBook and Twitter. If anyone would like to follow along in real time on those days, my Twitter account is @momdude56 . If you have friends who might be interested in my amateur reporting and random blatherationings for this event, please pass on the information about both this blog and my Twitter account.

A generic hashtag for these events is #NASASocial. There will probably be a more specific hashtag to use for this particular event — when I know it, I’ll pass it on.

I’ll do my very best to not squeeeeee too much, even if they let us see and maybe even touch some really ultra cool airplanes and wind tunnels and machine shops and flight simulators… Oh, who are we trying to kid? There will be squeeeeeeing all over the place. Instead, I’ll do my very best to not be boring, how’s ’bout that?