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Last night's launch...
Jun. 28th, 2013 03:23 pmBeing able to eavesdrop on the flight control team made it easy to pack up our stuff and go outside when the launch-minus-five minutes announcement was made. Once downstairs, we got away from the glare of the street lighting around the processing facility and turned in the general direction of "home" (where our hotels are located).
The first indication of the launch was a flash in the distance, on the far side of the vegetation growing within the grounds of the processing facility. If you didn't know better, you might mistake it for lightning, except for its rather reddish hue. The flash flickered for a second or two, and then a tiny, thin flame rose above the trees, traveling straight up. After a few more seconds, it became clear that the rocket was pitching to our left, northward.
As the rocket arced up into the sky, the noise of its engines reached us. It was not as loud as the Soyuz from a couple of nights ago, but still impressive. The rocket continued to climb and pitch, foreshortening the flame from its engines into a point. Shortly after staging (first stage engine shutdown and separation, and firing of second-stage engines), the rocket entered sunlight and the exhaust plume became visible, soon morphing into a wispy, glowing pattern hanging motionless in the northern sky as it slowly dissipated.
The launch occurred at 22:53 local time. We were back a the hotel within a half hour.
The next scheduled launch is that of a GLONASS satellite (similar in function to GPS, but Russian), which was rolled out of our processing facility this morning at 6 am on a Proton-M launch vehicle. With any luck, I might actually get to see (as in "having my eyeballs directly focused on" instead of "viewing it on television") my first Proton launch, after 10 years of these campaigns!
The first indication of the launch was a flash in the distance, on the far side of the vegetation growing within the grounds of the processing facility. If you didn't know better, you might mistake it for lightning, except for its rather reddish hue. The flash flickered for a second or two, and then a tiny, thin flame rose above the trees, traveling straight up. After a few more seconds, it became clear that the rocket was pitching to our left, northward.
As the rocket arced up into the sky, the noise of its engines reached us. It was not as loud as the Soyuz from a couple of nights ago, but still impressive. The rocket continued to climb and pitch, foreshortening the flame from its engines into a point. Shortly after staging (first stage engine shutdown and separation, and firing of second-stage engines), the rocket entered sunlight and the exhaust plume became visible, soon morphing into a wispy, glowing pattern hanging motionless in the northern sky as it slowly dissipated.
The launch occurred at 22:53 local time. We were back a the hotel within a half hour.
The next scheduled launch is that of a GLONASS satellite (similar in function to GPS, but Russian), which was rolled out of our processing facility this morning at 6 am on a Proton-M launch vehicle. With any luck, I might actually get to see (as in "having my eyeballs directly focused on" instead of "viewing it on television") my first Proton launch, after 10 years of these campaigns!
