In perhaps an unintended degree of verisimilitude to the actual shuttle launch experience, a lot of the time on the Shuttle Launch Experience ride is spent waiting. As you wait on the gantry, monitors show a video where former astronauts describe what it was like for them to fly on the shuttle.
The galaxy we live in, called the Milky Way Galaxy, is a barred spiral galaxy composed of at least 100 billion stars. It is approximately 100,000 light years across and about 1000 light years thick. It has a central bulge that is about 10,000 light years in diameter.
2 Answers. Fans typically just call it the galaxy far, far away, or the GFFA for short. Its inhabitants don't appear to have a name for it, the way we refer to the ours as the Milky Way... except that one particular culture (the Nagai, for what it's worth) apparently called it Skyriver, which I like.