It was only 9 days since our first launch attempt, but with our strange sleeping schedules, the constant anxiety of not knowing when we would fly, and the disappointment of the seemingly endless failed launch opportunities, it felt like a month.

Saturday, September 27: Don, Ed, Marie and I spent the previous night in Albuquerque on our quest to pick up our new star camera from Fed Ex, which was to arrive at 10 am. After accomplishing a few errands, including successfully retrieving the camera, we returned to the highbay to begin the somewhat lengthy camera replacement process. We unfortunately couldn't find the cable we needed to test the camera before installing it, so while zipped over to Radio Shack in Clovis, the star camera team went on the assumption that every thing would work just fine and mounted the camera.

Oops, bad assumption. At about 10 pm, after most of had returned home for a few hours of sleep (I was asleep), Ed found out the new camera was no where near as sensitive as the previous camera. The first camera had problems, but nothing as bad as this. The team was called back, and we began the 2+ hour procedure of extracting the camera from the gondola and replacing the new camera with the original, knowing we had less than 4 hours until we had to be ready for launch.

We got it done in time. We were still worried about the stability of the camera, though, as it continued to the show the malfunctions that caused us to replace it in the first place. These worries would prove to be valid — see below.

Sunday, September 28; 3:00 AM: Once again, the MLV came to pick us up. They pulled us out of the hangar and attached the crush pads (large pieces of cardboard meant to absorb impact upon landing) and the ballast hopper (big cartons of glass dust that can be dropped to increase the balloon's altitude) as we had done several times before. We then waited until 6:00 before they pulled us out to the launch pad. Some of used the time to get a little sleep in the back seats of our cars.

We pulled out to the launch pad, and it looked good. No hints of the heavy fog we saw the previous attempt, and the surface and low level winds were low. Again, we waited around for a while. A little after sunrise (about 7:00), they decided to rotate the flight train by 20 degrees (it's important that the gondola be directly down-wind from the balloon so that it passes overhead at launch). And they started to lay out the tarp on which the balloon rests, and brought out the parachute. Definitely a good sign, although we'd gotten this far before.

Then, a challenge for us. Worried about another bout of fog, we had covered the mirror with plastic to protect it from condensation. But we had trouble getting it off, as it had caught. We eventually managed to rip it off, but we left a small piece in front of the mirror. Nothing we could do about it. Fortunately it was the clear plastic and not the orange (we had used a sheet of each).

Finally, the last step: Mark removed the pump hose from the cryostat and closed up the hatch Marie and I had carefully constructed. The gondola was then out of our hands.

And then, the point of no return! They began to roll out the balloon, which means almost certain launch. They can't reuse the $50 000 balloon after they remove it from the box. Wow, this might actually happen! I might actually be going home!

The launch went well. We immediately congregated around the computers, anxious to see if the experiment would actually work. With the exception of the star camera, everything worked pretty well. As far as NSBF is concerned, the primary goal of this test flight was to see that they could communicate with us, and that worked fine. Our primary goal was engineering, to ensure that all our systems worked and talked to each other properly. Everything but the star camera, which will certianly be fixed by the next flight, worked fine. Our secondary goal was to collect science data. Unfortunately, this was mostly a failure as we can't point accurately for long periods of time without the star camera. The flight was far from a failure, though, and was succesful as far as our primary engineering goals.

A note about the pictures: In my opinion, this isn't quite as stunning a gallery as my JPL Launch photos. There are a few reasons for this: it was overcast; I spent more time shooting with my film camera, and hence less time with my digital camera, especially of the launch itself; we had done this many times already, and the novelty was wearing off. I plan to post the series of photos I've amassed during the aborted launches, and will describe the pre-launch procedure in more detail. Additionally, it occured to me while looking through the morning's photos that a great closer to this photo essay would have been a picture of any one of the us sleeping, or at least closing our eyes, in our chairs at our desks during the many hours following the launch. Oh well, I missed that opportunity, so you'll just have to imagine it.