Season's greetings will be offered by International Space Station Commander Jeff Williams and Flight Engineer Max Suraev in a special video message airing this week on NASA Television and the NASA Web site.

The greetings are part of the daily NASA Video File beginning at noon EST weekdays. For NASA TV streaming video, scheduling and downlink information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

The public also is invited to send personal holiday greetings to the station crew using the NASA Web site or Twitter. To send a personalized message to the crew via the Web, visit: http://www.nasa.gov

NASA has purchased two reusable solid rocket motors from ATK Launch Systems Inc. of Brigham City, Utah, to provide a "launch on need" rescue capability for the final planned space shuttle mission, targeted for September 2010.

The reusable solid rocket motors are the propellant-loaded sections of the solid rocket boosters that provide thrust for the first two minutes of a shuttle flight. The $64.6 million modification brings the total value of the contract, which was awarded in October 1998, to $4.1 billion and covers work started in February to produce and transport the two motors.

Work will be performed at the contractor's plants in Brigham City and Clearfield, Utah, and facilities at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Astronauts are not the only ones earning wings on the International Space Station. Butterflies emerged aboard the station recently, to the delight of science students across the country. That experiment and studies of bacteria that advance research about food poisoning and infections are the subjects of live NASA TV satellite interview opportunities from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. CST on Friday, Dec. 18.

International Space Station Program Scientist Julie Robinson will be available for interviews along with Dr. Nancy Moreno, a principal investigator of the Painted Lady butterfly education activities. Moreno is a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine who is conducting the butterfly research with the National Space Biomedical Research Institute in Houston and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

I was on reddit.com a few days ago and there was a cool submission of this website that let you go around in a sort of 3D virtual tour. Sort of like how Google Street View works only it was the inside of the ISS.

Anyone have any idea what I'm talking about or what that URL is? I have been looking for it for 3 days and I can't find it!

On 3 February 2006, cosmonaut Valery Ivanovich Tokarev hand launched the Amateur Radio satellite SuitSat-1 from the International Space Station during an EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity = Spacewalk).

SuitSat-1 was a very special Amateur Radio satellite.
A discarded Russian ORLAN Space Suit (in Russian a "Skafander") was equipped with an Amateur Radio transmitter, which transmitted telemetry and greetings from youngsters to the youth of the world in several languages.

In 2010, an Amateur Radio satellite will once again be hand launched from the International Space Station. It will be called ARISSat-1.