back row supporting the commander and pilot during the dynamic phases of flight during launch, raendezvous and of coure taking off with 300 pounds of thrust is pretty exciting on a florida afternoon there. as you know the solid rocket boosters only operate for the first two minutes of launch and then essentially all of the solid rocket fuel is used up and they separate away from the rest of the shuttle and then we go the rest of the way on the shuttle main engines. once we get into orbit, we start preparing for the rendezvous with the international space station. we do a number of burns over the first two days. you can see you need to be hanging on when you do those burns because they do in part a force on the shuttle and then there was a team of three of us, commander and pilot and me that are really working through the rendezvous procedures as we go through these important burns, as we bring in navigation information and data and try to understand where we are. this is a picture of us taken from the crew on the international space station. that big piece in the middle was the structure w