A day at the vault...

Oh, but how I wish it were a bank vault! But no, the subject at hand is the room a few feet below the surface of the launch pad, less than a horizontal stone's throw from where the loud end of a Proton-M sits when it is ignited. The room is used to house a couple of racks of electronic equipment that "talks" to the satellite sitting atop the rocket during the countdown sequence.

The day started with the transfer of the equipment from various places around the полтинник onto a truck that, when loading was complete, made its way slowly down the road to the launch pad. Once there, a crane lowered the items through an air shaft into the vault. When not in use, the shaft is capped with an assembly made of a number of hefty "I" beams welded longitudinally, creating a layer that resembles a small piece of hugely oversized corrugated cardboard, with vertical corrugations.

I provided support for the first few hours, when there was interaction with the Russian technicians, and then left with a group that was returning to our area. Unfortunately, the person arranging transportation had forgotten the cardinal rule of having people at the pad, which is that they may not remain bereft of transportation for any amount of time (which meant that the one-and-only van that had brought us to the pad couldn't take just some of us back to the area, and that another van had to be called to pick us up, which wasted about half an hour, though I suppose one could say that watching Russian laborers mix concrete had a certain amount of instructive value: the extent of the technology used in the process was an electrically operated mixer, but I digress...).

By the time we got back to the area, it was past lunch time, but as I walked down the hall past the shut dining hall to the stairwell, one of the servers - Valentin - popped out and asked if I had eaten lunch. I said no. He motioned me inside and said he'd saved some food for me and the other person who had been out at the pad and missed lunch.

As I sat down, I got on the radio and got in touch with the other guys (there were three of us who had missed lunch), who were happy to commandeer a van to return to the hotel and have a bite to eat.

I mostly read Jimmy Buffet's Tales from Margaritaville after lunch. I had started reading the book soon after arriving for the campaign, but the first few pages didn't grab me and the book remained on my shelf until about ten days ago, when I completed the first story in the book. I enjoyed it, and it tugged at those wanderlust strings in my heart. Ah, Margaritaville!

Now that I'm about 80% of the way through the book, I find I'm really enjoying the stories and, just as was the case with my adolescent fling with the Sherlock Holmes canon as the right-hand side of the book grew thin, feeling a bit wistful that the material is running out.

However, this is probably a good time to be reminded of Lesson Five from the story titled Are you Ready for Freddy?, which reads:

It takes no more time to see the good side of life than it takes to see the bad.

I also like Lesson Six:

If you decide to run with the ball, just count on fumbling and getting the shit knocked out of you a lot, but never forget how much fun it is just to be able to run with the ball.

The wind and the hotel staff has been playing merry havoc with the garden out front, the former because that is the nature of an autumn wind, and the latter, I suspect, because they'd like to get the task of collecting fallen leaves done with for the year. A few days ago, I took the following image, enhanced it with Photomatix, and posted it on my Flickr account:

Today, there are a few of the blue flowers left, but virtually all of the red leaves are gone, leaving just the whitewashed stalks of the trees.

Tomorrow, I'm due to support launch vehicle rollout and the first part of Breeze-M propellant loading. Now, I should probably go wind down.

Cheers...