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A Good Morning's Flight
Dec. 5th, 2014 08:17 pmAfter hearing the first test flight of the new Orion space capsule was scheduled to lift off at five minutes after seven in the morning, five minutes after I normally leave for work, I thought I could surely show up ten minutes later one day without anyone noticing and watch the official streaming video. On Thursday morning, though, I went to the NASA site five minutes before seven and saw the Twitter updates mention a boat inside the safety zone. With that, I decided I couldn't wait and headed for work, getting there to see the news channel all the TVs in the lobbies are tuned to still showing the rocket on the pad in a tiny corner of the screen. When the channel enlarged the image, I heard the wind was wrong now, and on checking again that morning I saw at last there were problems with valves in the rocket and the launch would be scrubbed for the day.
There was talk of trying again the next day, though, and I went to the NASA site the same time the next morning to see that this time everything seemed to be working. The only problem was that the stream cut out seconds before ignition, and I couldn't hear what elaborate sendoff the public address officer delivered this time. Instead, I just saw the rocket vanish into the clouds less than a minute after liftoff and the video cut to the ridealong camera. I managed to watch until the fairing panels separated and then headed to work, where nobody seemed to notice just when I came in.
After that, checking further updates showed the booster stage had pushed the capsule into its higher second orbit, and just before my usual lunch time I checked the news channel again to see the splashdown in the Pacific, which was also somewhat cloudy. Going twice around the world in the time between breakfast and lunch and looking down on it from on high would make for a memorable morning. At the same time, though, I'm aware the Orion capsule was being launched by a stand-in Delta 4 Heavy rocket, the Space Launch System with its hopeful, nostalgic white paint and black roll patterns not yet built (the pictures of the Ares V cargo lifter that had preceded it had invoked a different kind of familiarity with its orange-brown insulation). That does get me thinking of the Ares I-X test flight now five years in the past, even if that did seem to be that much more of a lashup to try and convince a new administration something was being accomplished.
There was talk of trying again the next day, though, and I went to the NASA site the same time the next morning to see that this time everything seemed to be working. The only problem was that the stream cut out seconds before ignition, and I couldn't hear what elaborate sendoff the public address officer delivered this time. Instead, I just saw the rocket vanish into the clouds less than a minute after liftoff and the video cut to the ridealong camera. I managed to watch until the fairing panels separated and then headed to work, where nobody seemed to notice just when I came in.
After that, checking further updates showed the booster stage had pushed the capsule into its higher second orbit, and just before my usual lunch time I checked the news channel again to see the splashdown in the Pacific, which was also somewhat cloudy. Going twice around the world in the time between breakfast and lunch and looking down on it from on high would make for a memorable morning. At the same time, though, I'm aware the Orion capsule was being launched by a stand-in Delta 4 Heavy rocket, the Space Launch System with its hopeful, nostalgic white paint and black roll patterns not yet built (the pictures of the Ares V cargo lifter that had preceded it had invoked a different kind of familiarity with its orange-brown insulation). That does get me thinking of the Ares I-X test flight now five years in the past, even if that did seem to be that much more of a lashup to try and convince a new administration something was being accomplished.