My 15 Minutes of Fame NASA SAREX experience with STS-65 My students at Richland Elementary in Birdville ISD and I talked to astronauts aboard the space shuttle on mission STS-65 using Ham Radio patched through to a landline. I'm KB5CXR. I'm very grateful to the Ham Radio experts who helped make this event possible. The Press Kit is here. It took over 18 months of planning and preparation to accomplish this incredible once-in-a-lifetime experience. Review the FACT sheet or the NASA archived web page.    Students from across Birdville ISD submitted questions to ask the astronauts and we selected twenty. Time was short and only eight their questions off before time ran out and the space shuttle was out of reach. We put on a summer space camp to prepare for the big day and study some up on some of the experiments they were conducting on the shuttle. One of my favorite explorations was on micro gravity.  We were in the news! What an exciting day! Here is a video of the broadcasts. (Sorry for the poor quality, but they were recently pulled off an old VHS tape and digitized. I will try get a better copy.)

Education Service Center 11 took video of the downlink communication

and the video is below. Again, this video was captured from an old VHS tape.