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After I shared the story “A Japanese Science Fan made “GoogleSatTrack” and Invited by NASA,” I got a comment saying that there is more to the story. So I checked Kashiwai’s blog (the developer of GoogleSatTrack), and there it was; he posted one more surprise in his blog not so long ago. (If you haven’t read the previous story GoogleSatTrack, please read it HERE).

“On July 21, 2011, the last day of the space shuttle program, an unbelievable thing happened to me while watching NASA-TV,” Kashiwai wrote in his blog, “it is probably a personal tiny miracle, but it was a tremendously huge matter to me.”

That day, he was watching NASA-TV to see the historical moment; the space shuttle Atlantis returning to Kennedy Space Center to end the 30-year space shuttle program.

To Kashiwai, space shuttle has been like the symbol of his dream since he was a child, so he knew that he wouldn’t be able to watch it without being emotional.

At the moment the television show showed the Mission Control Center, he was astonished by what they were showing on the big screen. It looked very familiar to him because it was GoodleSatTrack, the satellite tracker he made.

“Intuitively I knew that it was my work but I couldn’t believe it,” Kashiwai wrote, “It is only an online application made by an armature programmer, and it on the screen in the Mission Control Center right before the atmosphere entry, which is the most critical moment. There was no way I could believe it.” He continued “I hadn’t expected that such thing would happen to me.”

In the blog, he added that NASA has their own tracking system of course, so they just used his application to display the location of Atlantis in a simplified way.

Even so, he must have been very excited because he became a part of the dream he has had from childhood.

Image by YouTube (Video below)

“STS-135 Entry Flight Control Team Guides Atlantis Back to Earth”

Source: Kashiwai’s blog (Japanese)

This is JAPAN Style!