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I was only there on Saturday the 23rd. I had planned to be there on Friday
as well. But some minor work on my truck turned into a major effort to
fix things that the shop messed up. I got my truck out of the shop at 3:30PM
Friday and was on the road fully packed an hour later, which was amazing but not good enough. There was no avoiding the Friday afternoon traffic jams out of the Bay Area and over the Sierras by that point. I took some serious detours via Hwy 84/Vallecitos Rd to Vasco/Discovery Bay/Hwy 4 to Hwy 99.
(That's basically circumventing the parking lots, err... Interstates from the Bay Area to Sacramento.)
I ended up arriving at AeroPAC around 2AM.
I thought I had to apologize for missing a Friday LCO
(Launch Control Officer)
shift that I had
signed up for online. I had tried asking on the list to get the message to them that my truck wasn't out of the shop on time. But Richard had printed the schedule before I was back on the schedule. So they had found others for the Friday afternoon LCO shift they didn't know I had signed up for. :-) I still found the night launch LCO shift open and wrote my name in for that, which was one of the shifts I wanted to do.
The launch during the day was worth the short visit. Lots of meeting
people and their fascinating projects. I got pictures of the Nibbles
vs Mercury Joe drag race, which at first Nibbles seemed to have won off
the pad but only Joe ended up surviving. The largest project launched
that afternoon was the 3-stage N-N-M attempting 96K - the 3rd stage
didn't light but all the stages were recovered intact. With more
projects like that attempting the 100,000' neighborhood, that record
is going to be reached by HPR some time soon.
The potluck as usual was a lot of fun. Thanks to everyone.
The night launch was a lot of fun. It was only my second time LCO'ing a night launch. As Sue mentioned (thanks for the really nice message Sue) the children brought up a lot of models during the night launch. Though there was some high power too. I had a lot of fun.
I remember one moment of ad-libbed comedy when Conner's rocket came back on chute obviously toward the LCO table. I stepped to the side out of
its way and said over the PA system, "It's going to hit the LCO table in
5, 4, 3, 2, 1... and it's down but it hit the guy line for the FM transmitter. Is 99.9 FM still on the air?" ... "OK, I heard a honk from the east end. Thanks. We're still on the air." When was the last time
we got to do a 5-count for a rocket landing on the LCO table? :-)
The kids were well-behaved.
Though there was a moment of serious adult
supervision needed. One of the children didn't have a flashlight. So one of the 14-or-15-year-olds said, "It's OK. I've got my lighter." I immediately asked, "What kind of 'lighter' do you mean?" He showed a Bic
lighter as expected. I said what any of you would have, "No fire near the
rockets. Get a flashlight." The common sense of that must have clicked
with them because they promptly went to get flashlights and were back a moment later. Those of you who have kids - this is something you should make sure they know.
The rockets kept coming until 10PM. It isn't as late as we went at Aeronaut
(when we went to the 11PM end of the waiver.) But then again, the weather
and temperature were perfect at Aeronaut. It was seasonably cool at that
time of night at XPRS so it was actually really good that we kept going
as late as 10PM.
I had taken a short nap during the afternoon because I knew I wasn't going
to get a lot of sleep that night. In order to reach my road trip goal for
Sunday, I woke up early and, quietly as I could, packed up my camp and
was on my way at 4:30AM. Only at the very end of the packing did I hear
a voice from a neighboring camp. Sorry about any disturbance.
Why did I go on a road trip? I needed to take my mind off not being able
to attend another launch on Monday that I had been planning for a year. I was going to go to the inugural space launch at the New Mexico Spaceport, a rocket by my friends at UP Aerospace. But an unfortunate situation out of
my control left me unable to participate in the launch.
It was so disappointing that I continued to take the time off from work and planned to do something else. I went to southwestern Utah and hiked around
in the mountains looking for space shuttle debris for a couple days, capped by a couple visits to national parks in the area. The search for "Debris 6" from the space shuttle is a project that Stratofox dusts off once in a while when someone gets a chance.
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Fragments and a smoking motor casing from Mike's rocket fall down.
This parachute was meant to carry much more than just a nose cone.
No large rockets are launched while this Boeing 747 flies by about 20 miles away.
We can't get anything anywhere near it at that distance - it's well outside our airspace waiver.
But we just don't want to give any passengers anything to imagine otherwise.
It's very rare to see any airliners around Black Rock.
As an aviation buff, I had to try to get a long-range photo of it.
Since it was to the east of Black Rock going southbound, we figured it
may be coming from Europe bound for Los Angeles.
A dust devil swirls just south of the AeroPAC XPRS flight line.
The Black Rock and the Away Pads
A rocket touches down on the range near the Range Safety Officer table.