Number 16:A KSC RAVE

Cue theme music: "The Middle", Jimmy Eat World

My first business trip for USA saw me at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) for three days. Due to bad timing, I flew out from Houston about 14 hours after I flew in from Michigan, which meant I hadn't had time to stop into work between trips. Wait for it; this will be important in a minute. While I was on vacation, I received a voice mail from my Station Training Lead (STL) telling me that the test I was going to observe had moved from 0300 Friday to 0600 Thursday, which is why I moved my flight up. Unfortunately, I discovered later that I only caught 9 out of 10 digits of the cell phone number he left. So there I was in Florida, at the security gate at Cape Canaveral Air Station (CCAS, which is part of/next to/friends with KSC) after a couple of wrong turns, trying to convince the guard to give me my badge a day earlier than it was scheduled for. Fortunately for me, he was really nice and called around to get permission, since it would be a real headache trying to get it tomorrow morning at 0-dark-hundred. But that's when I discovered the 9 digit cell phone number. So I started calling around to my STL, to the flight controllers who were supposed to be there, to anyone else on the team I could think of. Even called back to the office to ask people to dig up phone numbers for me. I checked my webmail, but didn't see anything relevant to the test.

Four hours later, I start getting phone calls back. It turns out that the test had moved again, this time to the next week, and the flight controllers had cancelled their trip. The other people on my team were scattered around different hotels and had turned their phones off because they couldn't get signals in the building. And the emails explaining everything turned up the next day when I could sign into Outlook.

After all this, things started going much better. I walked out to the beach and saw bright Mars over the ocean get swallowed by an oncoming storm. I slept in since the test had moved. My STL took me to get my OTHER badge that would get me into the buildings. I was shown the testing room and the high bay that has all the elements of the space station ready to go, waiting for a ride. I later got a great tour of the high bay and although I didn't get to enter any of the elements this time, I got nice views of mechanisms I and my group teach, the payload racks and clean rooms, the test rigs and the huge cranes that move everything around. Late that night they actually got around to activating my mechanism and, although they didn't perform the tests I was hoping for, I gained insight into the one-time-use system I'll be training a crew on.

The next day we were shown around the Orbiter Processing Facility where Atlantis hung with her wheels less than a foot off the floor, surrounded by the scaffolds and platforms that allow access to her innards. I poked my head into her wheel wells and middeck; took pictures at the tip of her tail and the end of her nose. What a stark contrast to our previous stop, the Columbia hangar, where Atlantis's older sister was spread out on grid lines, on molds, and in crates. It's incredible what they've done in there, reconstructing the tragedy and learning so many, many lessons. Materials, aerodynamics, re-entry forces; structures--they've discovered a little something more about every one of the disciplines that went into constructing that orbiter. But on September 12 it'll all go into storage on an unused floor of the Vertical Assembly Building (VAB).

I stood at the Launch Director's console in Launch Control and took a look out the window at the crawler-way seven feet deep in gravel that the gigantic platform travels as it transports the space shuttle from the VAB to the pad; saw a pair or Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB) from both the platform they launch from and from a floor several stories above their tips in the VAB; saw the runway where the orbiter lands; took a picture in front of the countdown clock with the pad in the background.

In short, the trip was a space geek's dream. Maybe next time I go out there I'll take the tourist tour on the bus, go out and see the Astronauts' Memorial and the Apollo 1 pad, get someone to take me out on the launch pad. But for this trip I think I reached my saturation level; any more might have been emotional overload. I hope soon to have pictures up of all but the Columbia (cameras are not allowed in the hangar). If you ever have a chance to go on any sort of tour at the Cape, take it. You won't regret it.