On station...

At the полтинник and waiting for word on completion of the preliminary stuff prior to the start of flow, whereupon Maya and I will alternate being up here in the second-floor office and down in the control room.

I got hit with a campaign-related translation from English into Russian after dinner yesterday, and between my written skills in Russian and the fact that the original English was typical engineering managementspeak (terse to the point of being nearly telegraphic, and topheavy with jargon), I was really struggling.

I can generally deal with the latter, having been in the business in one capacity or another for quite a while. As far as the former is concerned, though I seem to be getting better with my endings, my "register" is woefully lacking (you can think of "register" as the type of language used in an expression, as in the difference between referring to something as a "test" as opposed to an "examination"). The reason for that may be that I tend to write in a very conversational manner in English, with a good native intuition (braced by education) as to the register required, say, in a business communication.

In any event, about 3/4 of the way through the text - which had to be translated ASAP and sent by fax last night to the Russian side - I went downstairs to get something from the dining room and out of the corner of my eye, spied Maya in the lobby and prevailed upon her to give me a hand. By the time we were finishing the text (very little of my original effort remained), Viktor and Evgeniy marched in the door and the four of us (okay, three and a half of us) banged away some more to put a high spit shine on the text, which went out with no further ado.

Dwight just popped his head in. Work's afoot!

Cheers...

Just hit 50%...

Fuel prop load is about halfway through, in terms of filling the spacecraft's fuel tanks. I suspect, however, that today will be a replay of Saturday, with quite a bit of time devoted to post-flow operations - perhaps even more time than on Saturday, since the Russians have requested that some closeout operations scheduled for tomorrow be done tonight, because in addition to having satellite operations and upper stage operations going on at the facility, Khrunichev has some preliminary operations to perform with the propellant canisters for the next campaign ("next" as in: "we're scheduled to fly out on the plane they fly in on").

In any case, it's a cinch that none of us here at 92A-50 for prop load will catch the bus going to watch the launch of the next Progress cargo vehicle (headed to the ISS atop a Soyuz launch vehicle), which is scheduled for somewhere between 7 pm and 8 pm tonight. Ah, well... perhaps I'll have an opportunity to catch the launch the way I did the other night, standing outside and looking off into the distance.

It's about time for me and Maya to swap stations again. Must go get ready.

Cheers...

Scoping out the Progress launch...

For the second time in a week, I've hit Google Earth to figure out where to look to catch tonight's Progress launch. Here's the final image I worked up:



I've taken the liberty of labeling the little pimple at the top of the image, which is the launch site. The large building in the foreground is 92A-50, and above that are the placemarks for the Fili Hotel and the WWII memorial named after a local fellow who went off to fight the Nazis. The unlabeled placemark near the left edge is the complex at pad 39, for reference.

If we don't get out of here soon, I have a good idea of where to look from outside of 92A-50, and if we do get back to the Fili soon, I have a good idea where to look on the horizon with regard to the pad complex and the memorial. The distance to the launch is a few kilometers less than it was the other night, but I doubt it's sufficiently closer to actually hear anything (we didn't the other night). As I look out the office window, I can see a high overcast, which won't matter much, as the Soyuz roll program will pitch it over away from where we are, eastward.

I think I'll go and quietly nose around and try to find out when work will secure for the day.

Cheers...