[X] My Assistant

[climber]

A few days before Phoenix launch, as I knew I was going to be away from the internet, I tried to find out the phone n° @ Nasa I used to call to follow launches on the phone. I've got some reactions here about the interest of listening only without actualy watching and I guess this deserves its own topic.
If the moments of lift off up to probe release are exiting, what I realy love myself is "before" and "after". I mean, I don't take pleasure only during 9.8 seconds watching a 100m race. I realy love to know what is gona happen, I listen to the differents coms, go's, status assesments by Official speaker, and so on... In my mind, listening i.e. imagining what is going on give me a stonger feeling than images themselves. I guess that, if I was to watch a launch from the Cape, I'll be very frustated not having real time informations.

Landing is something a bit different since...there's NO images at all. By Apollo's flights my English was not good enough to understand in the text what was going on. By MPF, I had to rely on a dial com which I had to reboot after each information was coming down (very good feeling up to now thou ). By Spirit landing I was in Pasadena with the TPS sharing not only JPL's coms and images but also sharing with 2000 people in the same room. Another
I'm sure each of us here has some feeling and/or souvenirs to share on this topic...

[tuvas]

There are 2 moments which I have which were somewhat unique than most people in this sense. The first one happened March, 2006, during the MOI of MRO. One week before, I had been interviewed, and accepted, a post as a student programmer with the HiRISE camera, pending the successful MOI of the MRO. I was about to have what until then had only been a dream, to be able to work with a real space mission, pending the successful MOI. I was quite nervous. Of course, I have little doubt that those who had worked on the project for years were even more nervous, but they got to hide it by being in the front two rows (I stood in at row 3.) I attended the MOI party they held at the University of Arizona, it was quite amazing.

The second happened 4 months later, and involves considerably more of my life. Three and a half years prior, I had started working on 4 cubesats with the University of Arizona. Of the four, one was never really fit to fly, one was a fully-functional ground test cubesat, which was loaned to us from Rincon Research, who funded 3 of the cubesats. The other two were on a Russian DNEPR, set to launch that afternoon. I was the last student to join the SSP at the UA, the others had been working there for some time previous, but it had always been my dream to work with space technology, and I sought out the program, despite being hampered by a lack of information. After all of that time, there was only 3 students still left at the UA, myself included, one who was in grad school and still involved from across the country, Chuck Green, who has helped to build most of the recent AMSAT missions, and Uwe Fink, our not-quite-willing adviser who just couldn't say no. In the room were about 40 people, most of them from various local news agencies. I was the tech point of contact, setting up the live video display to the general public, and keeping tabs on the chat room where I could hear from the other people who were involved in the project. I also was involved in setting up the telecon which was being broadcast to us from CalPoly, our point of contact for the launch. Finally the time of the launch was upon us. The video feed we had from the launch wasn't synced up with the audio, sounds much like the Apollo launches someone here mentioned previously. The count down went to 0, and nothing happened for a few seconds, then the rocket lit up the screen, we were all excited. We were awaiting the news to here if the launch was successful, in the room with so many press. After 2 minutes, the updates stopped coming in, we just keep hearing, the simulation says we should be this high. Chuck Green, who had the most experiences with launches, first noticed that this was a sign of problems. About 10 minutes after launch, I noticed that they said something along the lines of "Launch Failure". Quickly I grabbed the microphone from Uwe Fink, and announced the dreaded news, in the mean time trying to find out what I could about it from the chat room. Soon the press flooded us with questions, most of which we didn't have any answers to. The telecon made it sound like there was a chance that they had still orbited, but just not in the planned orbit, which would have been fine for us. But they couldn't tell us exactly what happened for about 3 hours after, at which time the press release came. It was definitely an interesting experience. In the end, it helped open the doors that I wanted, and I did get my hands on something that reached 30 miles high (Although I think I've now officially made it to the space limit, at least in software, but that's another story).

But I still find it quite fun to see launches happening, it really is a neat experience. Just that I have those two that really stick out in my mind.