Mr. Disproportionate Response

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…