First Alaskan in space!

I'm a couple days late on this one, but the NASA nerd in me can't let it go. The Space Shuttle Discovery launched on Saturday night on shuttle mission STS-116, piloted by Bill Oefelein--the first Alaskan in space! He's got a blog that he intends to update from space, which is just unbelievably cool.

Discovery is set to rendezvous with the ISS this afternoon. In the process, it will do something of a "back flip" so the crew of the ISS can take pictures of Discovery's heat shields. One of the shuttle's crew members, Sunita Williams, will be relieving one astronaut as a crew member on the space station.