The Silencer

Courtesy of our friends over on Sipsey Street......

Hurricane Hilary

No, not Mrs. Clinton.

Looks like we'll be going through the tail-end of this towards the end of the week.

Headed Home

We pulled out about 2240 PDT.
No ETA on arrival yet. Should know tomorrow.....

Successful Launch, Headed back on Sunday

Well, we put another one on-target.
After safeing and stowing the rest of my systems on the platform, we'll head back to Long Beach late Sunday afternoon. It takes about 7 days to get back, and then I'm taking a couple of days off.
Gonna head to Angeles Shooting Range with my son for some rifle time!

L-2 hours.....

Time to do the final alignment on our fixed antennas.
Gonna get *real* busy here soon.

L-4 hours and counting.....

Rough day yesterday, but we're on schedule for a 2018 UTC launch.
You can watch it here:
http://www.sea-launch.com/current_index_webcast.html

L-2 Days and counting.....

On schedule!
Tomorrow I head over to the LP and set up our equipment to link the Command and Telemetry from the spacecraft back to the "Mother Ship".
Gonna be a brutal day. I'm the only one left (or rehired) who can do it, and I'll be over there all by my lonesome for about 10 hours.
I don't have too much stuff to take over with me, and I'll take a bunch of water and some snacks, along with my Droid to pass the time.
At least the helideck is a walk *down* from where the Comm Shack is!

Picture is the latest weather here.

We Have Arrived.....

We're about 1' N and 2' E of where we need to be.
That means the ship will transition to Dynamic Positioning in the next 30~40 minutes, and we'll hold here until daylight, when helo ops will begin.
The LP should be ballasted down 70' by late morning/early afternoon, and then we can start using the link bridge between the ships.

Reno Airshow Eyewitness Report

One of the guys I used to work with was at the airshow when the accident happened.

Here's the email he sent us today:

Take a look at the last second of the attached video I took during the F18 demo. This shows how close we were to where the plane hit, impact was directly in front of us. Picture attached is what I think is us hitting the deck, circled. Link is to a video of the plane going down from the other side of the field. The pilot made an adjustment a split second before he hit us. You can see the correction in the video, I don’t even think he was more than 100 feet above us when he did it. Nothing in our minds thought we were getting out of that. I truly have no idea how we survived. Had the pilot, and I believe he did, not made that last quarter second correction we would have took a propeller on the chin and a lot more people would have died. We were also lucky to have hit the ground as fast as we did, people behind us got hurt by flying debris. We were hit with debris and covered in fuel but somehow there was not a fireball. Why that didn't happen I will never know. Had there been, that also could have been a game ender. Really hard to get my head wrapped around how we lived. Really makes you appreciate who, and what, you have in your life.

Mike

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaWB_7RGTQ4

Current Position.....

We're at 5.5* N, 147.5* W, and Motoring along at about 10kts.

Looks like the launch will get pushed back to the 24th, but no "official" word yet.

Nighty-night, all!

Where's Waldo, Part Deux

We're now at 6.5* N, 146.5* W, and chugging along at 9.4 kts.

Or as one of my friends called it, "Groundhog Day, Part 3".

We were supposed to get to the launch site on Wednesday about 1700, but the platform had a turbocharger failure on one of their big Diesels that runs the generators (it has a Diesel-Electric propulsion system), and they were dead-in-the-water for about 4 hours while they fixed it.

I'd post more pictures, but everything has to be approved by Security and the Export people, so I'll see if I can get some approvals for simple things like the helo.

In the meantime, here's the latest Enhanced IR picture from the weather guys.

The little green square is where we are.