Less than 18 hours to go...

...and folks here are in standard running-around-like-crazy mode. I just finished supporting the last morning meeting of the campaign, where post-launch activities appeared for the first time on the meeting slides.

Although there are no technical issues at this time, I have yet to support the blessing of the rocket (we leave in about half an hour), go over to the audio-visual folks to do a voiceover for the Russian lead on the project, handle any last-minute interpretation and translation, and maybe get some sleep before showing up for work at 2 am.

The translation is more of an issue than it might otherwise be, as configuration control next door is not all that it could be, resulting in some duplication of effort, though mostly, the result is simply an expenditure of time to find documents that have already been translated.

Yesterday's work included a trip to the pad where folks took turns going up the tower to sign the logo on the side of the payload fairing. I, of course, made my contribution:


The unnatural position of my hands is due to having wrapped the lanyard of the marker (and the lanyard of my camera) around my hand, since the last thing you'd want to do up there is drop something in the "crack" between the rocket and the tower.

And what did I scrawl? Well, take a look:


(Babe, if you're reading this, I miss you and look forward to seeing you again soon.)

Work calls.

Cheers...