Part III: A South Jersey Native With Lots of NASA ''Toys''

by KYW's Michelle Durham

One South Jersey native helps astronauts get ready for the weightless conditions they will experience in space.

Sean Melody (right) now lives miles away from South Jersey.  He works at the Manned Spaceflight Center in Texas. But this graduate of Holy Spirit High School in Absecon, NJ says his thoughts are never far from home.

And Melody says his Cherry Hill relatives keep him up to date with happenings back home:

"They sent me -- of course -- newspaper clippings of when the Phillies won the World Series."

Melody has worked at NASA for 13 years:

"I worked for five years in Mission Control, I worked as an attaché in Moscow, and I also worked at NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory."

And now...

"I'm the deputy chief of the Space Vehicle Mock-Up Facility."

(Durham:) "What a great job!"

(Melody:) "It's not really a job, actually."

(Durham:) "It's more of an adventure?"

(Melody:) "Yes it is!"

(Durham:) "What exactly do you do?"

(Melody:) "I'm responsible for the overall operations. Our building trains the astronauts for all the internal activities that they will do at the space station and the space shuttle."

And he says that so far it's all systems "go" as NASA transitions from the shuttle program to the new Orion space exploration vehicle program (bottom right):

"We actually had to go back and look at lessons learned, to make sure that things we learned from Apollo we don't have to relearn."