It is Sunday and I am sitting down enjoying the cool hotel room, glad not to be out of the sauna of Cocoa Beach. This has been a long week and I am pretty excited to get back home, but with a nice chunk of Sunday down time, I thought I'd note a few recent events.
More than a week ago, now, our family spent 3.5 days up on the St. Joe River. We had a great time. The Kunkels are so fun to go with and have all the gear and experience to make camping a great and memorable time. We spent most of our time swimming, tubing and fishing, all of which were a lot of fun. The kids all seemed to enjoy their time in the water and were sad to see it go. Rachel wished she could stay there forever and cried real tears when we had to set out Friday evening. George and Kathy cooked up some fabulous Dutch Oven dinners, much to the delight of all, and even made some ice cream which really hit the spot after a very hot day. Kersten had the most difficult time as I had the job of taking the kids down the river on tubes while she had to get Michael to take a nap in the hot tent and follow his considerable wondering. Worse, he would not go into the water at all so would sit on Kersten's lap and cling to her continually when she was watching the kids by the water. Sarah clung to me. On our first float trip, she would only ride with me on my tube and apparently felt so comfortable that she fell asleep on my lap as we were heading down through the ripples. After that, she wasn't too keen on floating, but rather wanted to let the other kids float while we fished. I would through the fly out and try to catch a fish that she could reel in. She had a lot of fun riding on my back while we walked up and down the river. She was not, however, too excited about the bugs that frequently landed on her, and she often asked me where my "bug" was (meaning my fly), which I thought was pretty funny.
After getting in bed at midnight Friday, I got up at 6:30 am Saturday to try to put everything away from the trip, get a little exercise in, pack, and head out to IFT at 10 am. This also meant gathering every shred of clothing I owned and throwing them in the washer since I was going to be gone for 8 days (IFT, then Mars Launch). Somehow I made it in the nick of time and headed off with Tamsin to Lewiston, en route to Chicago. IFT went very well for Decagon, although the thermal properties booth that I manned was a little slow. I lived in mortal fear of another ESL person coming up to me and asking if my thermometer would work in an oven. After the 10th time trying to explain to them that it was not a thermometer but measured thermal properties, I finally gave up and said yes, it is a $4500 thermometer, would you like to buy it. Several thought they would and left with me shaking my head. We did get many people in that actually knew what we were doing and were thrilled that something like what we had was finally on the market. I think we will get several sales from it, but will have to put more effort in creating a package that is more understandable for the less-informed.
From IFT I flew down to Orlando for the launch of the Phoenix Lander that is going to Mars. After putting so much work into working with JPL to build our sensor (TECP), it was very exciting to be able to go down to see it launch. The downside is that we had to schedule several days for the visit because the rocket can launch any time in a 21 day window depending on the weather and spacecraft problems. I got to the hotel at 2 am Wednesday morning and have spent most of the rest of the time here trying to wake up. I had to pick up Doug from Orlando later that day (about a 1 hour trip from Cocoa Beach, which is where we are staying and is next to Cape Canaveral) and spent an exciting 2 hours on the road there because of torrential rain and lightening that slowed traffic on the "beeline" road that runs from here to there. Thursday we had a science team meeting to discuss many of the issues relating to the science that Phoenix will do on Mars. I think generally these are reasonably contentious meetings, but this one was pretty toned down, probably because people were excited for the Launch. We did not know many people there except Mike, the person that we have been working with all along and the head of our particular instrument suite. After the meeting, we spent quite a while talking with Mike about his desire to get Doug to go work operations in Tucson for up to three months next summer. I am pretty sure that is not going to happen as Doug's wife and new twin girls may not be all that excited, even if he could move down there with them during the time. In the evening,
Doug and I headed down to a jetty south of Cocoa Beach and did some fishing. Doug had packaged up our rods and brought them down for us to fish with, but it soon became apparent that we were fishing with some pretty light stuff for the fish we were catching. My rod was bent double several times and some of the guys there were laughing at us. Still, I think we caught the most fish of any of them and we had a great time. The payback was that there were swarms of no-seeums there that bit my legs to pieces and now look like I have a excellent case of chicken pox. People were very interesting there. Some of them were very unfriendly, telling us that they would rent their net for $10 to lift our fish from the surf 15 ft. down, while others were uncommonly nice, following me around and borrowing other peoples nets to pick our fish up. It was very strange.
Friday was suppose to be launch day but it was bumped back a day because the thunderstorms did not allow them to fuel one of the rocket boosters. We had originally planned to go fishing on a boat on Saturday, but because of the switch, we were able to change the trip to Friday. We went and caught several nice fish. Doug had the catch of the day, a very nice sail fish that tail-walked on the water several times. I got the privilege of being the cameraman for that one.
Friday night we went to bed before 8 pm so we could get up at 3 am for the Launch. Many veterans of launches watch them from the beach here in Cocoa Beach as you are as close or closer to the pad as well as you don't have to drive onto KSC through all the security. Doug and I decided to head out to Kennedy as we thought that we were here for the experience so would take it all in. We joined a lot of other people at the visitors center boarding buses and heading out to a grass strip between a road and a swamp a mile or so into the complex. Since it was about 4:30 am, the launch pad was just a lit up, 2 in. blip on the horizon, mostly washed out by the bright streetlights right in front of us. Most of the pre-launch excitement was provided by a police officer that was sitting right in front of us with his lights on that would occasionally, when a car passed that was exceeding the speed limit, peel out in the grass, burn rubber on the road, and generally smoke his way down to the unfortunate car and give them a ticket. We agreed that his crazy antics were far greater a hazard to our health than the cars that were going 1 MPH over the limit. Eventually he tired of the game and shut off his lights, along with the couple of streetlights that were shinning in our eyes. Finally, after a long wait, the man on the speaker counted down the final seconds and our little firework lit up the sky with its ignition. From our vantage point, it did not look a lot bigger than a large firework, but the rumbling of the ground was more spectacular. I am sure those of you who watched it on NASA TV saw it better than we did, but the thrill of being there to see it was wonderful. It was fun to see the booster rockets pop off the main rocket right on key and watching little glowing lights float back to earth. They looked like the remains of fireworks, but unlike those little bits that float down, these glowed for most of their decent. Following the launch, we we got back on our bus and headed back to the visitors center. By then it was 6 am and the 3 am wake up call had gotten the better of us so we headed straight back to our hotel and went back to sleep. For the launch we got passes to the KSC visitors center which we decided to use. We got to ride on the shuttle experience (mostly involving a lot of head shaking and banging around) and see some of the early modules and rockets from the Gemini and Apollo missions. The highlight of the center was a life-size mock-up of Phoenix that was in their Mars explorer area. Although most things were just nondescript boxes, TECP was there in all its detail at the end of the robot arm. Doug and I got our picture taken next to it so we can finally show exactly how big it really is.
In the evening, we decided that we had to swim at the beach at least once since our hotel is right next to it, so we headed down there to do a little body surfing. The waves were extremely disappointing however, and we only managed to get a little wet and salty. I would take California or Hawaii waves any day. We went out to dinner with Mike, his wife, and son (newly graduated Mechanical Engineer) later that evening which was a lot of fun. They are very interesting people and a lot of fun to talk to. We ate at a Cuban restaurant which was good, but seemed to think that the way to flavor was MORE GARLIC!
Well, that is all from here. Sorry for the long post. Hope all is well. Our prayers are with Kai. Now all I have to do is wake up at 4 am tomorrow and hit the airport.
