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To help us walk through

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what they're doing now, what the crew
is up to, we're joined right now by

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Colonel Jim Dutton,
who's one of our astronauts,

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part of the 2004 class.
Jim, thank you for joining us.

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It's great to be here, Allard. Thanks.

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Well, if you wouldn't mind,

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we've got a couple minutes
before we see the crew,

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why don't you walk us through
you?

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Okay. A little about me:
I grew up in Eugene, Oregon.

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I joined the Astronaut Corps about four
years ago, as you said, May of 2004,

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with the
class we affectionately call the Peacocks.

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And my background is with the Air Force.

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I was a test pilot, and before that I flew
as an operational pilot in the F-15 Eagle.

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I have to—you opened it up, I have to ask.

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This is what happened: the classes give
themselves different names, and Peacock.

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Why a Peacock?

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Well, we didn't give ourselves that name.

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Although I'll say
we took it over an alternative

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that we preferred
Peacock to the other one.

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But
when we first came in,

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we were told as a class

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that we would not fly on the shuttle,
based on the way things were going

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and how it looked
with the number of crew members

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or astronauts who had not flown yet.

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And so there was also a lot of pomp
and circumstance about our arrival

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because of the new vision
for going back to the Moon.

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And
so we were labeled Peacocks

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because we're all show and we don't fly.
So I think we can, you know,

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take pride in that now that we've got
our first classmate on this flight,

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Aki Hoshide,
a Japanese astronaut,

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and we're going to start seeing a lot
more of our classmates on shuttle flights.

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And they're trying to get actually
all the rookies in the office,

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the unflown astronauts,
up in

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one mode or another, most on shuttle,

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before we retire the shuttle.

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As a way to get experience to be ready
for, obviously, the Constellation program,

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the Orion capsule and spacecraft.

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Exactly. We're going to have a five-year,

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roughly, delay between shuttle
and bringing Orion online,

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so we want to carry as much experience
as we can over into Constellation.

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As a matter of fact, NASA is also

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right now actively looking,

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at least for another month or so,
for a 2009 class.

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That's correct.

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I think pretty probably safe to say
that that class will not fly on a shuttle.

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That's true. They are being brought
in to actually fly on station

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during the interim before Constellation

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and then obviously carry
on into Constellation.

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So,
yeah, it's very exciting.

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It'll be a five-year gap,
which is a very long gap,

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and it's going to be great to have
some new folks in the office.