Finally, just after dinner on the 21st, Matt and I happened to encounter the Runway Czar. He’s the one that decides whether or not the C-17 can land, and thus the one who had been delaying my flight. He said that while the flight would be delayed a few hours, it would definitely land later […]
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After one more delayed flight, on the 21st of January I was getting bored of McMurdo and really eager to go home. My boredom was at least partially due to doing almost nothing, so I spent the afternoon with Annamarie. She, like me, was done work and just waiting for a flight. We went back […] On the 20th, my flight back to Christchurch had been delayed. The unusually warm weather was making trouble for the ice runway over at the Pegasus Airfield. Flights had started to land only in the coldest part of the night—if they could land at all. I woke to find a new boat in the harbour, […] On the 19th I left the pole, back to McMurdo and eventually home. In the previous evening, I had convinced a few people to join me spending some time building up warmth in the sauna and then dashing outside to the poles (and then right back to he sauna, of course). Back in McMurdo there […] LDB is waiting. Matt and Elio are waiting for good weather near the gondola to fly out for recovery. Most of the riggers, techs, and the super-pressure balloon team are waiting for good weather to launch. Everyone is waiting to go home. I am waiting for a flight to pole, where I will spend a […] A few days ago, Don randomly showed up on his way to pole. Naturally, he visited us in the BLAST Ops room. Since he was there during one of those rare times when all six drivers were in the room, we had him take a mosaic panorama of us working. It was a pain to […] At 9:31 local time (NZDT) BLAST-Pol terminated. It now rests about 630km away, roughly along the South Pole Traverse. The gondola is at rest, we think it might be upright-ish, and systems still work good enough for us to guess that it might be upright-ish. So, at least for now, things are in good shape. […] Yesterday was a momentous day in our flight. We switched from our targets far from the sun—mostly what we call the “axehead” in Vela—and moved a region in Lupus very near the sun. To celebrate, Tristan danced to the region’s theme song: Duran Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf. (Yes, all of our targets have theme […] Since launch I have not taken a lot of photos. This is partly because there’s less to take photos of, and partly because I’m too constantly busy for new photos. The upside of this is that it’s easy for me to catch up to the present (almost) in a single post. This starts the first […] Before launch day, I had collected some more Christmas-related pictures that I was planning to post. But, they were preempted. Now they have been “deempted” and I don’t have many recent pictures to post instead. This includes two Christmas-related sets: The Christmas Eve party on the 24 (from Matt), Christmas dinner and MAAG on […] |
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