How I learned to... love the bomb!
Cryosat 2 launched successfully - as you might guess from my previous gibbering :)
I'm ecstatic for many reasons: The first Cryosat was lost at launch five years ago, and it was gutting. Everyone pulled together and rebuilt it. That was the last Space project I worked on before going off to work on MoD stuff. You can imagine how much everyone on the project wanted this to work!
This time it launched on a Dnepr Rocket. That's always high drama, because the rocket is a converted ICBM and launches from an under-ground silo. It is absolutely awe-inspiring to watch. (And utterly terrifying in those final seconds of count-down.)
There are several stages of rocket-burn: Primary - the ones you see, Secondary - you don't see these, it's telemetry only, and Tertiary - which positions the satellite in orbit. Usually the rocket is attached to a launch-tower (like Shuttle) but Dnepr uses the old 'cold-war' subterranean launch sites, so there is nothing to see above ground, and this missile suddenly emerges from the release-hatch and hits its primary burn. WOW! Watch it here.
Then I bit my fingers for about twenty minutes (while the other engines did their thing) until acquisition of signal over Africa. Between worrying about 'Go for launch' clearance and AOS it was sixty minutes of sheer terror...
As a teenager in the last throes of the cold war, I never, never imagined that I would one day watch hardware I helped build be launched into orbit by a missile built by 'the enemy'. How fast life changes! And *high five* to my unknown Russian colleagues who really delivered the goods today! Thank you, guys :D
I'm ecstatic for many reasons: The first Cryosat was lost at launch five years ago, and it was gutting. Everyone pulled together and rebuilt it. That was the last Space project I worked on before going off to work on MoD stuff. You can imagine how much everyone on the project wanted this to work!
This time it launched on a Dnepr Rocket. That's always high drama, because the rocket is a converted ICBM and launches from an under-ground silo. It is absolutely awe-inspiring to watch. (And utterly terrifying in those final seconds of count-down.)
There are several stages of rocket-burn: Primary - the ones you see, Secondary - you don't see these, it's telemetry only, and Tertiary - which positions the satellite in orbit. Usually the rocket is attached to a launch-tower (like Shuttle) but Dnepr uses the old 'cold-war' subterranean launch sites, so there is nothing to see above ground, and this missile suddenly emerges from the release-hatch and hits its primary burn. WOW! Watch it here.
Then I bit my fingers for about twenty minutes (while the other engines did their thing) until acquisition of signal over Africa. Between worrying about 'Go for launch' clearance and AOS it was sixty minutes of sheer terror...
As a teenager in the last throes of the cold war, I never, never imagined that I would one day watch hardware I helped build be launched into orbit by a missile built by 'the enemy'. How fast life changes! And *high five* to my unknown Russian colleagues who really delivered the goods today! Thank you, guys :D