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Serendipity...
Aug. 14th, 2005 07:43 amI again rose at 3:10 am and made the bus ride out to the Soyuz launch pad. It wasn't as cold this morning (though I did wear an undershirt beneath my paintball jersey) and there weren't as many meteors (though one bright streak a few minutes prior to launch did evoke an involuntary "Ooohh!" from the crowd), but the bus was just as full.
This morning, everything went off without a hitch. Since the Mars Express launch had taught me that taking photos of night launches ranks up there with snapping grip-n-grins of a snowball fight in a whiteout blizzard (or of a searchlight being beamed in your direction at night), I left my camera on the bus and settled down to wait with everyone else.
One of the major advantages of understanding Russian, besides the obvious professional one, is that you are among the first to find out just how long it is until launch. At the 15-minute mark, I went around to let the mostly French crowd know the score. Galina, our security escort, told me that she and the bus driver had already seen a couple of satellites go by, the result of it being so close to dawn, with our eyeballs near the ground and the satellites flying in sunlight overhead.
When one minute was announced, I made myself comfortable but apparently, the one-minute announcement was for the start of the launch sequence, as the actual launch took place nearly 6 minutes after the one-minute warning.
It took several seconds for the ignition sequence to complete, and all we saw from our vantage point was an orange glow from the direction of the launch vehicle, which looked a little like a water tower, with its bulbous nose, sticking up from behind the berm that surrounds the actual launch pad. Then smoke bloomed, obscuring the rocket until it silently rose out of the smoke on a pillar of orange flame.
Then the noise of the engines reached us.
The rest of the launch would have been fairly routine had it not been for the time of day. We watched as the rocket shrank to a pinpoint of orange flame in a fairly big sky that was entirely free of clouds, but filled with stars and a bright reddish dot that is the planet Mars.
Staging occurred just about the time the launch vehicle emerged from Earth's shadow into sunlight and suddenly, we all caught our breath. As the Soyuz continued to claw its way out of the planet's gravity well, a most amazing exhaust plume began to bloom in the sky, reminding me somewhat of a Portuguese man o'war atop a Christmas ornament. The sky was so clear, you could see the exhaust plumes of individual engines on the launch vehicle. I scrambled onto the bus for my camera. The picture below - where the bright dot near the tree at the bottom of the image is the departing Soyuz - really doesn't do it justice.
I'm scheduled to go into work in the afternoon today, thank goodness. I think I will catch up on a couple of hours of sleep.
Cheers...
This morning, everything went off without a hitch. Since the Mars Express launch had taught me that taking photos of night launches ranks up there with snapping grip-n-grins of a snowball fight in a whiteout blizzard (or of a searchlight being beamed in your direction at night), I left my camera on the bus and settled down to wait with everyone else.
One of the major advantages of understanding Russian, besides the obvious professional one, is that you are among the first to find out just how long it is until launch. At the 15-minute mark, I went around to let the mostly French crowd know the score. Galina, our security escort, told me that she and the bus driver had already seen a couple of satellites go by, the result of it being so close to dawn, with our eyeballs near the ground and the satellites flying in sunlight overhead.
When one minute was announced, I made myself comfortable but apparently, the one-minute announcement was for the start of the launch sequence, as the actual launch took place nearly 6 minutes after the one-minute warning.
It took several seconds for the ignition sequence to complete, and all we saw from our vantage point was an orange glow from the direction of the launch vehicle, which looked a little like a water tower, with its bulbous nose, sticking up from behind the berm that surrounds the actual launch pad. Then smoke bloomed, obscuring the rocket until it silently rose out of the smoke on a pillar of orange flame.
Then the noise of the engines reached us.
The rest of the launch would have been fairly routine had it not been for the time of day. We watched as the rocket shrank to a pinpoint of orange flame in a fairly big sky that was entirely free of clouds, but filled with stars and a bright reddish dot that is the planet Mars.
Staging occurred just about the time the launch vehicle emerged from Earth's shadow into sunlight and suddenly, we all caught our breath. As the Soyuz continued to claw its way out of the planet's gravity well, a most amazing exhaust plume began to bloom in the sky, reminding me somewhat of a Portuguese man o'war atop a Christmas ornament. The sky was so clear, you could see the exhaust plumes of individual engines on the launch vehicle. I scrambled onto the bus for my camera. The picture below - where the bright dot near the tree at the bottom of the image is the departing Soyuz - really doesn't do it justice.
I'm scheduled to go into work in the afternoon today, thank goodness. I think I will catch up on a couple of hours of sleep.
Cheers...
