hey - glad you had fun.
 

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Oh, cool. Yeah, Joe, in my experience, is a good guy. Denise will be disappointed to hear he has a girlfriend.

I was pleased last week to see Aki had a flight assignment. I met him not long after his selection when they had a welcoming fish fry for the new Ascans here. It was a rather unusual astronaut experience -- rather than people flocking to them, the ascans were having to break into conversations to get people to talk to them.

And the JAXA folks had it even worse; they spent most of the evening in a corner by themselves. I went and talked to Aki for a while, and he seemed amazed to find someone that knew something about the stuff JAXA's doing.

I saw him again a few months later at a conference at SCH; we talked again for a while there, since I think Joe and I were about the only ones in the room that knew Aki was an astronaut.
 

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Yeah, they were both pretty cool. I spent a long time talking to Joe... he was interested in the research I'm doing, and thought it was pretty cool. Which of course, was funny to me, because I'm like, what could be cooler than being an astronaut?

Aki and I tlaked for a few minutes... I spent more time talking to his wife, who is very nice and makes really really yummy meatballs. Chad talked to them both more, I think. There's a JAXA task opening up in his group, and he's lobbying hard to be put on it... basically, it would mean coordinating training between JAXA and NASA. No way to know if he'll acutally get the task, but he's hoping for it. :)
 

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Chad would be good at that...
 

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