Tales from the Trail

President Barack Obama and a group of brainiac young students played stump-the-astronaut with the current occupants of the orbiting space station.

This was an event beamed live between the White House Roosevelt Room (the bookcase has been converted into a whizbang video screen) and the space station.

Obama, phone cradled on his shoulder, talked to the group of astronauts sitting erect and being careful not to float away in their gravity-free environment.

The 12 middle school students from Michigan, Florida, North Carolina and Nebraska had lots of questions once Obama turned the microphone over to them, such as the age-old query:  what can you really see on Earth from space?

“Yes, we can see a lot of great landmarks. We can see the Golden Gate Bridge (in San Francisco), the great skyscrapers in New York and the Grand Canyon is just breathtaking,” said one astronaut.

A cloudless sky made a perfect backdrop for a stargazing
party at the White House on Wednesday night. But instead of parading on a red carpet, VIP guests made their way around the South Lawn where earlier in the day astronomers set up telescopes in preparation for the party.

President Barack Obama hosted 150 local middle school students, teachers and astronomers to scan the sky. But first, Obama said there were a “few other stars out tonight,” introducing former astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Sally Ride, and Mae Jemison.

For the president, the event might have been a break from the pressing issues of the day, but he was still working on his political agenda. Obama introduced two students — one who discovered a supernova and another who found a pulsar — and he made a pitch for his education plan.

President Barack Obama treated astronauts on the International Space Station to a little levity of his own as they traveled at 17,500 mph, circling the planet once every 90 minutes. “Do you guys still drink Tang up there?” the president asked to laughter.

It took some effort, but the 10 astronauts in blue shirts, including some from Japan and Russia, bobbed but managed not to float off during  the presidential session by holding onto a rail with their toes.

The astronauts appeared on a screen in the White House Roosevelt Room, and Obama initially did not realize he had to use a telephone to speak to them.  “The handset sir,” a staffer instructed.