Thursday, September 18: After a 5-day delay, it looked good for our launch opportunity. The stratospheric winds had slowed, and the forecast called for calm surface winds. We spent the afternoon and evening preparing the gondola, and went home at around 8:00 for a few hours sleep before our busy day was to start.

Friday, September 19: Up at 12:30. I had trouble falling asleep and got caught up in my book (Ender's Game — a great book), and ended up getting just an hour and a half of sleep. Came into the lab at 1:00 and started preparing the gondola. At around 2:00, however, we suffered a crippling blow. The most recent reports showed that the stratospheric winds had increased to 33 knots — we would like them to be below 20. We decided to wait for the next opportunity. Just when we were all coming to the conclusion that maybe home would be a nicer place to live than Ft. Sumner...

Not all was lost, however. Anticipating the possibility of such an event, the JPL group, who share our workspace, were prepared to launch in our place. They don't require as long a flight, and as the surface winds were sufficiently calm, they took the opportunity we passed up.

Rather than returning home to complete our night's sleep, some of the BLAST group decided to stick around and watch the JPL launch, as we would be in a considerably more relaxed state than on the morning of our own flight.

Again, I have provided no captions for the pictures, but if in doubt, the picture filenames might provide some insight. In particular, the last image shows the communication antennae, which normally point straight up, tracking the gondola as it rises.