Mr. Disproportionate Response

I’ve heard it said that there are only two kinds of uncles in the world: Awesome, cool uncles, and creepy child molesters. With the way things are going down at Homeland Security, I’m starting to think that they’re trying to cast Uncle Sam as the latter.

I keep seeing more and more articles and information on this new business from the TSA. This is insane. If you’ve not heard anything else about it yet, the TSA has these awesome new backscatter x-ray machines that look right through your clothes to see anything you’ve got strapped on under the cloth. Now, THEY say that it’s not overly revealing or going to expose a person, but… yeah. Check out some of the stuff on youtube. These things can generate some pretty high-resolution images of naked peoples. It’s invasive, and kinda makes me want to tape aluminum foil letters spelling out the fourth amendment under my clothes and walk through one of these scanners.

The next issue that’s upsetting folks is that if you don’t want them taking naked pictures of you, you have to subject yourself to an “enhanced pat-down,” which involves the feeling of breasts and genitals. As one blogger put it, “Kids, do not ever let a stranger touch you. If they try, scream, run away and tell someone immediately. Wait, whoops! Unless it’s government molestation. Then, shaddup.” I mean, it’s not even government sanctioned, but government MANDATED sexual assault. Wasn’t this kinda like why we let the Iraqi parliament hang Saddam? After the aluminum-foil 4th amendment, I might have to go in for the enhanced pat-down, and give some grinding and moaning during the groinage part. You know, to make the experience more interactive for the TSA…

Finally, there’s the medical aspect of all of this. TSA is telling people that there’s no risk to being bombarded, top to bottom, with x-rays. When I go in for a busted wrist, they layer me in sheets of lead-stuff, so that as little of me as possible gets x-rayed, so that kinda tells me that this stuff is not good. The people doing research with/for the TSA is saying that the health risks are “very small.” Very small is not the same as NONE. I’m sorry, but if someone tells me that I’m going to be in a very small traffic accident, or get a very small disease, I’m not going to be a part of what’s going down! Harm is harm, whether it’s tiny or huge.

These new measures from the TSA are no good. It’s invasive, it’s asinine, and can be done a million better ways than what they’re using. The fact that it ONLY targets air travel and not train, ship, or other transportation methods just makes the words of George Carlin resound that much more clearly: “Airport security is just an illusion to make white people feel safe.”

Well, it’s Wednesday and our Delta 2 is still parked at the SLC. Lately, I’ve been adding periodic updates on facebook from my phone as we get to key moments, but yesterday was fairly well silent. My updates yesterday were silent because HOLY CRAP BALLOON OPERATIONS WERE INSANE. Our normal process involves going through and doing a check of all of our radiosondes the day before the launch to make sure that everything gives us a strong signal and all of our radio frequencies are locked in, so we can just grab a sonde and launch when it’s time to put a balloon up.

We did that Monday night so yesterday morning, everything seemed fine. We prepared to put up our first balloon, and we could just not get the sonde to give us a good signal. We replaced the radiosonde, we tried to re-sync it… and of our 4 tracking computers, only one could get a lock. We got it out, but we’re four minutes behind schedule. We buckled down, we got back on schedule, and everything was fine. Sort of. Over the course of the day, we had a total of something like eleven low-resolution sondes–which are usually very reliable–fail on us. Twice, we had to shut down our tracking systems and reboot, just to get them to recognize our sondes. Finally, toward the end of the day, one of our 12 systems just shut down. It stopped talking to the rest of the system, leaving us down 8.3% of our ability to track balloons.

Adding to the chaos and stress of the day, we had something going down on base that had us on and off of lockdown faster than Lindsey Lohan is in and our of jail and rehab programs. The stories of what was going on were so confused and inconsistent that it’s hard to even speculate at which part was real. So far, none of my staff is sure what DID happen, but it was somewhere between an active shooter barricading themselves inside the headquarters and someone calling an exercise and forgetting to tell people that it WAS an exercise. It was nuts and just added all manner of complications to an already hectic balloon release schedule.

Everything that came up, though, we got through. We’re awesome. We fix problems. …No, that’s not right. We don’t just fix problems–we’re so awesome that we’re undaunted by problems, and manage to just power right through them. And despite having all of our tech take a massive shit on us, we managed to get good data to our launch officers.

The day was amazingly, remarkably stressful, and I was doing it all on two hours of sleep out of 32 hours of work. It was pushing the boundaries of, “Wow, I can do this,” and after all of that…

They scrubbed the mission again, right before launch.

Today, Wednesday, we’re on a stand-down, so our staff can get rested up before jumping back into the marathon. Thursday, we charge back into the bear pit. I just hope we actually get this thing off the ground…