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previous ~ ~ ~ next Oh! Oh! It was so exciting! It launched! Anthony worked as a systems engineer for Gravity Probe B for about a year and a half. Something my husband touched is currently in space, orbiting our planet right now! Do you know how insanely cool that is???? At least it is to me! So we drove down to Vandenberg on Sunday and we went out to one of the viewing sites on Monday. The launch was scrubbed (evidently due to upper-level wind speeds alternating between green and red too rapidly to make it safe to launch--or at least that's my non-technical understanding of the explanation) on that date, but Anthony explained that with a one-second launch window (one second! How crazy is that??), that there was only a 30% probability of it launching on the first try. Somewhat higher for GPB since they've been working on it for so long. So we stayed the second day, hoping it would launch. If it hadn't, we'd have come back home without being able to see anything. But, fortunately for us, it did launch on Tuesday. The funny thing is that when we planned on going down there, I was mostly going for Anthony (well, and who wouldn't want to play hooky from work for two days?) because he was so excited about it. I wasn't terribly disappointed when the launch was scrubbed, felt bad for Anthony, but other than that... And then the next day, there were so few people compared to the first day. I almost thought we might as well just turn around and go back (except that the buses that carted us out weren't going back yet) because (in my perfectly logical and rational mind) since there were so few people today, there must be an even poorer chance of it launching. But we stayed and we watched the TV's they had set up with all kinds of information and live feeds into the control room (which, I have to admit, was immensely cool) and then as it got closer and closer, we kept hearing higher and higher probability numbers about the launch going up. So we headed over to an area Anthony thought would be good for viewing and waited for the countdown. We heard the announcer saying, "Liftoff", but because we were far enough away (and behind a ridge) from the launch site, we couldn't see the rocket at first. My initial thought was that something had gone wrong and all those years of hard work had just gone up, literally, in smoke. But moments later we saw it rising up and I actually Whoooo!ed out loud. I know, I know, shameful. And a few seconds later, we felt a slight percussion (we were, after all, 7 miles away) and then the noise hit us. It seemed almost unreal. It was vastly exciting and I've spent the day telling anyone who will listen about how marvelously cool it is. How many days until finals? What was one good thing that happened today? Miscellaney: Tell me what you think. No Inspiration Here ~ ~ ~ The Joys of Moving Out Most recent: The REAL surprise party - Monday, Jul. 11, 2005 Still not here - Wednesday, Jul. 06, 2005 Moved - Thursday, Jun. 30, 2005 I survived - Thursday, Jun. 23, 2005 Go see her. Now. - Thursday, Jun. 02, 2005 |
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