NASA will fire up the last shuttle of its Atlantis Space Shuttle Program on July 8, 2011 and Belize will be present at this launch through the attendance of Charles Godfrey. Charles, a Belizean national residing in Lansdowne, Virginia, USA, will be watching just three miles away, tweeting up a storm.
You see, Charles Godfrey was chosen by NASA as one of 150 people to attend the final shuttle launch and tweet about it. He is an avid Twitter user and was chosen in a lottery of which more than 5,500 applied. He will now have the opportunity to interact with NASA engineers, shuttle technicians and astronauts, and will tour the facility.
“Getting this lucky for the final launch is unbelievable,” commented Godfrey to the local media in his home town. “I’d love to work for NASA and be a scientist but that didn’t work out so for now I’m a software engineer.”
Charles says he is a self-professed space travel nut and that he became intrigued by space travel as a teenager when he saw his first space shuttle launch on television. Now, his fascination with space and following NASA updates on Twitter has given him the opportunity to travel to Florida and see the final launch of shuttle Atlantis first hand.
Atlantis is targeted to launch on July 8 at 11:40 a.m. — embarking on mission STS-135 to the International Space Station.
“Seeing the launch from only three miles away will be awe inspiring. The Space Shuttle Program represents the best of our determination and ingenuity. I am humbly honored to be one of only 150 given the opportunity to see the final shuttle launch,” said Charles.
Charles Godfrey, a 34-year-old father of three and Sr. Software Engineer at Unanet Technologies in Sterling. He is a graduate of St. John’s Junior College Sixth Form and Wheeling Jesuit University. He commented that his Twitter followers, of which he currently has 441, can expect pictures as well as a wealth of interesting facts during the launch.
Godfrey is promising his nearly 500 twitter followers lots of behind-the-scenes pictures of the launch. You can follow him at twitter.com/chaalz.
