Rolling Out

On December 19, we did Spider’s Compatibility test. This is essentially a dress rehearsal for launch. We go through our pre-launch checklist, disconnect from all our non-flight ground cables, and hang out on the launch vehicle (aka The Boss). The test went fine.

This set off a blur of days as we immediately prepared to start trying to launch, with the first attempt beginning the evening after Compatibility ended. For the first attempt, we had a whole bunch of little tasks to finish before we were really truly launch ready, like cleaning pre-flight data from the computers, and finishing arts-and-crafts on the sun shields. Which meant much of the team had little rest.

We had a couple scrubbed attempts, where we got all ready, rolled outside, and waited for the weather to maybe look good enough to launch. It didn’t. (Yet.) And then we reversed the procedure to roll back inside to try again the next evening. And again. Until finally…

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