Launch Part II February 17, 2006
Posted by spacemom in : She Blinded me with Science , trackback
The story continues…
We are all counting down together.
"10…9…8…7…6…5…4…3…2…1", BUT THE SHUTTLE HASN’T
MOVED! We are all shh’ing each other desperately trying to hear what
is going on. They are broadcasting the communication between the
shuttle and mission control over the load speakers.
This is what we heard.(Roughly, It’s been a few years)
"We have an anomaly on the hydrogen sensors" (mission control)
"Copy that" (Cmd. Collins)
"We’ve had a launch abort" (mission control)
Then everyone is dead silent. Imagine about a hundred people all
silent. We can still see the shuttle on the pad, illuminated by the
lights. A few people have radios turned on that do a play by play of
the launch. They start explaining that a hydrogen sensor spiked at T-7
seconds. The person in charge of that sensor aborted the launch based
on that.
We filed back into the buses. I felt sick to my stomach. Some of the
other scientists were trying frantically to call back to our control
center. We had 4 days of launch window and we just lost 2. Once you
get to a certain point in the launch, you must take a day to reset for
the next launch. Plus, we needed to find out what happened to the
sensor.
We got back to the hotel, crashed and went to Disney the next day. Our
next attempt would be early July 22, 1999.
(to be continued)
Comments»
I keep forgetting that you have SUCH a cool job. I’m eagerly awaiting Launch III. And I loved your story about driving around at 3 am and all the things you could see. A sense of humour definitely helps at those times!