Outbound
Here’s a picture taken from my balcony on Easter Sunday. Yes, it’s slightly fuzzy. Sorry about that. I had to zoom all the way in to get the picture, including using the digital zoom. Not too sharp, but I like the picture, so my Loyal Readers will just have to live with it.
Success! We flew our spacecraft this afternoon, on the first day of the launch period, at the first moment of the launch window. That’s very unusual for Atlas. It was picture perfect. Absolutely beautiful! And the best part is that I get to go home on Saturday!
Tomorrow we pack out and ship the stuff home. Since we’re in the USA this time, we don’t have to lease another Antonov. A bunch ‘o trucks will show up in the morning and drive away in the afternoon – some to Newtown and others to Sunnyvale. I need to get a few personal items into the Newtown shipment, like my new DVD player.
Had a big dinner with the spacecraft launch team at the Sunset Grill this evening. They’re in a very pretty location – right on the Banana River. It was pretty busy when we got there, so we stood around for a while waiting for our table. During our Standing Period, somebody rang a ship’s bell and they started playing loud music to go along with the sunset. It was a very pretty sunset. They had a guy playing a guitar and singing. He was pretty good but didn’t get much applause. I hope he at least got paid. After he was done, they started playing rock music from the 80’s. We all enjoyed identifying the songs and bands and, in most cases, cringing (link warning – cheesy 80’s music) at the thought that we ever listened to them.
Happy birthday to my brother Chris. I got my dinner group to sing the birthday song to him, after which he told me all the people in his meeting enjoyed the music. Perfect.
Time for bed – I have a lot of packing to do tomorrow. See you then.