Yesterday's work out at the pad was anticipated to be a fairly all-day job, but I underestimated just how "all day" it was. The point of yesterday's excursion was to deliver a second set of support racks to the vault, which - as I have mentioned previously - is a heavily reinforced underground room that's less than 50 yards from the loud end of the Proton when it lifts off.
By the time the work day was over, we had put in over 11 hours, including travel time.
We started the day in Hall 111, where the rack was moved from its positoin next to the launch vehicle to the rollaway doors normally used to bring railcars into and out of the facility. As we prepared to load the rack on a truck, I noticed preparations were under way to rig the launch vehicle for a lifting operation, to transfer it from its processing station onto a specially built transporter railcar, which will be used to take the rocket to the upper stage propellant loading station and then to the launch pad.
Before leaving Hall 111 and while on my way to the hall's badging station, I took the following shot, not realizing that I had not reset my camera from the "black-and-white" mode that I had used to copy some dictionary pages for possible OCR later. Still, I think it's a reasonable image:
The trip out to the pad went slowly, as we were required to follow the truck, which had been instructed not to exceed a speed of 20 kph (about 12 mph). By the time we got out there, the cover had been removed from the access well next to the vault and a crane had been erected to move the rack from the truck to the vault. In short, it didn't take much time to install the equipment.
The other part of the installation, as you might expect, was to verify the link between the equipment in the vault and that in the spacecraft manufacturer's control room, and that was where things bogged down, requiring (as far as I can tell) cabling to be checked and systems to be reloaded and rebooted. If you've dealt with such complex systems - and I have - you know stuff like this is all in a day's work (In fact, during the wait yesterday, I was reminded of the time I worked as a knowledge engineer, where the centerpiece product of the company I worked for - a LISP-based program called the Reactor Emergency Action Level Monitor (REALM), intended to work with nuclear reactors - would take 40 minutes or so to load on PCs of the day, equipped with something like 8 MB, if memory serves.)
A second task, which was accomplished with flying colors, was to check the comm lines between the equipment and the service tower, which required three people to do the work and six observers, including myself and representatives of the organizations involved. Some things are universal.
After getting back to the hotel, I sat down to dinner and spent some time talking to Ben M., the program director. It turns out that he and I share similar backgrounds (engineering), grew up in the same part of the country (more or less), and have circulated over the past years among roughly the same people in the aerospace industry, he as an executive and entrepreneur, and I as an interpreter and translator.
Dan Goldin? Ben has dealt with him; I've interpreted for him. Gen. Tom Stafford? Ditto. Not long ago, he had a meeting my former boss in Houston. He even knew the late Vladimir Syromyatnikov, whom I knew professionally through my NASA work and who was the mastermind behind the androgenous peripheral adapter system (APAS) that made it possible for the Shuttle to dock to the Mir back in the day. (Among other insights, Ben related to me how he had learned Vladimir Sergeevich had been tagged to design the one single moving part aboard Sputnik, which was the bearing for the fan used to cool the electronics inside the pressurized satellite capsule.)
Ben and I also share an interest in what happens in the sky above, although in this department, I think he outdoes me handily, as his interest includes what are called "Iridium flares," which occur when sunlight is reflected from one of the highly reflective antennas on one of numerous orbiting Iridium satellites onto a point on the earth. If you are in just the right position and are looking in just the right direction, you'll see a light appear in the sky for a few seconds and then fade (this is possible even in broad daylight, as the brightest flares weigh in at magnitude -9, or about 100 times as bright as the planet Venus in our sky).
Anyway, we talked about this and that until well past midnight over a couple of beers, and finally, it seemed feasible to go outside and see if there were any meteors to be observed. We took a couple of collapsible field stools out of the office, went out the front gate of the hotel, found a place about 40 yards down the road where we would be out of the glare of the hotel's lights, planted outselves in the middle of the road, and looked up toward the constellation Perseus.
We did see some meteors, but not the 60-80 per hour that had been predicted for the peak (and even though we were gazing upwards a few hours after the "published" peak, you have to keep in mind that the Perseids occur over a period of a couple of weeks, not a couple of hours). We chatted as we sat, and were distracted at one point by some Russian voices far down the road, but they seemed to be stationary; I concluded it was likely some folks grabbing a late smoke.
Soon, I noticed a star that seemed to be moving slowly away from another, neighboring star, but so slowly that I wasn't sure it was actually moving (I thought perhaps it was an optical illusion, the result of staring at two points of light for too long). Then Ben said, "Hey, check that out!" He was looking at the same point of light.
Then, a few seconds later, the moving star winked out, which would indicate that it was a satellite that had passed into the earth's shadow, but as it was about 1:18 am, that would mean the satellite was in a polar orbit. Or perhaps it was a UFO? (Technically, it is, as we never identified the object.) We didn't have much time to think about it, in any event, as it had became apparent that the Russian voices were moving in our direction.
Imagine, dear reader, that you have been going large a bit with friends and have decided to walk home along a road where there is no traffic, at a time when all normal people in nearby buildings are sound asleep. Now imagine that as you walk along, you almost literally run into two guys sitting quietly on chairs faced in your direction in the middle of what is a particularly dark stretch of road.
The chatter stopped abruptly.
I toyed with the kafkaesque idea of barking something like "Hand over your identity papers!" but only for a millisecond or two. Instead, I said "Good evening," even though it was well past midnight. The newcomers approached warily, and then recognized us and we all shook hands (apparently, one of the Russians had played basketball with Ben a little while ago), and a short conversation ensued. All's well, as they say, that ends well, but I will tell you, nonetheless, that all members of that homward-bound group tilted four points in the direction of "more sober" upon spying us like that in the middle of the road.
We didn't stay out too much later. Ben called it a night and went up to sleep, while I went up to my room to get my tablet computer, both to give the Moon a chance to set and to become familiar, while scanning for meteors, with the outlines of a few more constellations (Cepheus, anyone?).
Cheers...
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