GARRETT REISMAN: So now, we have a view of the White Room as there's Commander Polansky getting ready to suit up.
He'll be the first one to ingress the vehicle.
BRUCE BUCKINGHAM: What are we looking at here? This looks like the commander getting into his seat.
REISMAN: That's correct. It's Mark Polansky. He'll be climbing into the seat closest to our camera there and,
as the first one onboard, it might seem odd, you're looking at an airplane cockpit turned on,
90 degrees on its side. It's as if you took the nose and pitched it straight up,
because of course that's the position that the orbiter's in when it launches.
But it can be a little bit disorienting when you're used to seeing this cockpit,
you get in and your seat is, the back is on the floor.
And here comes Suni, climbing into the mid deck. So you have the middeck and the flight deck are the two
habitable spaces inside the shuttle. And she's also lying on her back as she enters her seat. Directly beneath,
in the horizontal position, she'd be directly beneath the, the pilot and commander and the two MS's on the flight deck.
Now here we have Billy Oefelein; he's the pilot on this mission.
He's also a, a fellow classmate of ours, and this is, again, his first space flight.
Back looking in at the White Room, we have a good look at Christer Fuglesang,
who's an astronaut from the European Space Agency, and he hails from Stockholm, Sweden.
Now entering our picture in the White Room is Mission Specialist Nicholas Patrick,
also a member of the 1998 class of astronauts. Born in the United Kingdom, actually,
and considers London and also Rye, New York, to be his twin hometowns.
BUCKINGHAM: And now we're watching Christer Fuglesang join Suni Williams on the mid deck, using straps,
it looks like, to help him get into his seat. I guess that's necessary since he's going to be sitting on his back like that.
REISMAN: That is, the suit does add a bunch of weight and those straps have to do a bit of a chin-up just to get into your seat.
Next we have, suiting up, Joan Higginbotham. Joan also, was also selected in 1996.
She grew up in Chicago and she's a kind of a local favorite since she worked for
quite a long time here at the Kennedy Space Center before being selected as an astronaut.
As we watch the, again in the White Room, Bob Curbeam, the last crewmember to board,
he, in addition to all of his spacewalking duties, he serves as the flight engineer. He's in the,
what we call the MS2 position, which means he is, assists the commander and the pilot
in the operation of the vehicle with also some help from MS1, who on this flight will be Nick Patrick.