Allard Beutel: To help us walk through what they're doing now, what the crew is up to, we're joined right now by Colonel Jim Dutton, who's one of our astronauts, part of the 2004 class. Jim, thank you for joining us.

Jim Dutton: It's great to be here, Allard. Thanks.

Allard Beutel: Well, if you wouldn't mind, we've got a couple minutes before we see the crew, why don't you walk us through you?

Jim Dutton: Okay. A little about me: I grew up in Eugene, Oregon. I joined the Astronaut Corps about four years ago, as you said, May of 2004, with the class we affectionately call the Peacocks. And my background is with the Air Force. I was a test pilot, and before that I flew as an operational pilot in the F-15 Eagle.

Allard Beutel: I have to—you opened it up, I have to ask. This is what happened: the classes give themselves different names, and Peacock. Why a Peacock?

Jim Dutton: Well, we didn't give ourselves that name. Although I'll say we took it over an alternative that we preferred Peacock to the other one. But when we first came in, we were told as a class that we would not fly on the shuttle, based on the way things were going and how it looked with the number of crew members or astronauts who had not flown yet. And so there was also a lot of pomp and circumstance about our arrival because of the new vision for going back to the Moon. And so we were labeled Peacocks because we're all show and we don't fly. So I think we can, you know, take pride in that now that we've got our first classmate on this flight, Aki Hoshide, a Japanese astronaut, and we're going to start seeing a lot more of our classmates on shuttle flights. And they're trying to get actually all the rookies in the office, the unflown astronauts, up in one mode or another, most on shuttle, before we retire the shuttle.

Allard Beutel: As a way to get experience to be ready for, obviously, the Constellation program, the Orion capsule and spacecraft.

Jim Dutton: Exactly. We're going to have a five-year, roughly, delay between shuttle and bringing Orion online, so we want to carry as much experience as we can over into Constellation.

Allard Beutel: As a matter of fact, NASA is also right now actively looking, at least for another month or so, for a 2009 class.

Jim Dutton: That's correct.

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

Jim Dutton: That's true. They are being brought in to actually fly on station during the interim before Constellation and then obviously carry on into Constellation. So, yeah, it's very exciting. It'll be a five-year gap, which is a very long gap, and it's going to be great to have some new folks in the office.