Return to flight...

I had been scheduled to work the current KASAT launch campaign in Kazakhstan, which was supposed to bring participants home (just) in time for Christmas, but got bumped from the list of participants a few weeks before the campaign was scheduled to start.

Just over a week ago, on December 5, a Proton launch vehicle carrying 3 Russian Glonass timing and navigation satellites launched from Baikonur but failed to put its payload into orbit, and as soon as I heard that, I realized that I had dodged a scheduling bullet, because past experience working launch campaigns told me that everything would be put on hold with KASAT until the cause of the Glonass launch failure had been identified and the Proton launch vehicle cleared for a 'return to flight.'

As it turned out, the Proton itself was not at fault for the failure. The cause, however, sounds pretty, um, hard to believe:

In what appears to have been a remarkable oversight, the personnel fueling the Block DM stage for the Glonass launch did not account for the larger tanks. That led to loading between 1,000 and 2,000 kilograms more propellant on the Block DM stage than what had been planned for the Glonass mission.

I like how SpaceNews describes this as a "remarkable oversight," and from my seat in the peanut gallery, I can only agree. (How does one fail to notice that one has loaded a lot more propellant than usual?)

And then I think back to the incident a few years ago when the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter gradually flew off-course and the root cause was determined to be a failure to convert between metric and English units.

And I am not so surprised.

Apparently, campaigners are well aware that Santa will be visiting them in Baikonur; the suspense has to do with where they'll greet the New Year. Wherever it is, I wish them all the best. I could easily have been there, too.

Cheers...

A day of thinking in French—and a little Spanish...

I finished the item due this morning with about 15 minutes to spare and was soon greeted by the arrival of a 3700-source-word French-to-English job.

Fortunately, the subject is aerospace, so things are looking up. I am not so sure of myself yet that I allow sentences to pass under my fingertips all that often without looking something up (a habit I fell into when starting out in Russian-to-English translation), but the number of sentences that cause me to sit for several minutes in an attempt to nail the meaning is dropping, methinks.

Anyway, I've translated 2,400 of those source words, and am leaving the rest for tomorrow.

* * *
I got hold of a book by Ramón Campayo with the rather doubtful title of Aprende un Idioma en 7 Dias (Learn a Language in 7 Days). As suggested by the title, the book was written in Spanish, which I am far from expert in, but between what I do know, a little skill in recognizing cognates, and the context of the book, my comprehension is not all that bad. Still, the going is slow.

As I understand the premise of the book, the key behind learning a foreign language is to address the issues of vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar, in that order. Naturally, a large and important part of the learning process relies on Campayo's own memorization system (Campayo is well-known as a memorization expert), the principles of which do not seem altogether so different from the fine general principles one can pick up from Harry Lorayne's writings.

Somewhere short of a third of the way through the book, the text presents a series of tables of essential vocabulary. Skipping ahead to about halfway through the book, I see the subject of grammar will be addressed.

I have my strong doubts as to whether one can actually learn a language in a week, but am reminded of something a colleague once said to me about a related subject: "What if he's wrong, and it takes twice as long?" Too, I suppose one can allow quite a bit of leeway for what is meant, exactly, by "learn." Although there's quite a bit of the book I haven't read yet, the part I have gone through looks interesting (though I haven't had the time to work through the text in detail).

Cheers...