Around a month ago, we had a half-day with a community meeting/assembly end the end, and I honestly thought that it would be another boring meeting, until I saw that somebody called Colonel Virts would talk to us at community meeting. What really stood out to me is that he was an astronaunt in the ISS, and he was a fighter jet pilot, and I am very interested in planes. So hearing his story was very fun for me. Here’s some of the things I learned…
1. Colonel Virts wanted to be an astronaut, and he decided that the best way to do that was to be a fighter jet pilot in the millitary, so he flew mostly General Dynamics F-16s.
An F-16
2. Colonel Virts’s first space mission was on the Space Shuttle, Endeavour in 2010.
A Space Shuttle
3. Colonel Virts landed in the Soyuz Capsule on June 11, 2015, in Kazakhstan.
As I said for the 1st thing I learned, Colonel Virts mainly flew F-16s, but he also tested more than 40 other aircraft. He was selected in 2000 by NASA. He retired from NASA in August, 2016. After that, he achived a Guinness World Record by doing the fastest Circumnavigation in an airplane at a time of 46hrs, 40mins, 22sec. Right now, he is writing a book called
The Astronaut’s Guide To Leaving The Planet. It sounds very cool and I highly reccommend it!
the ISS
Terry Virts speaking at our school