Flight Week: First Day!

Today was our first day of flight week. We arrived at Ellington Field and received our sweet security badges which allow us into some buildings that the general public can’t get into. We then were welcomed to Ellington by the Reduced Gravity staff. The welcome basically consisted of, Hello, we are really proud of all the teams for working so hard to get here…now if you do anything on this list, you aren’t going to fly, your team will be kicked off of the Air Base, or you will be surrounded by 20 men with machine guns and sent to jail…which basically leads to you not flying. After that lovely talk, Sam and I had to go to a flight week briefing meeting…basically…these are other things that you shouldn’t do or else…and this is what you can expect to happen. About an hour later we got out and were pumped to see our flight rig in all its glory. When we got there, Isa and Caitlin were gone and everyone looked a little upset. We noticed that the rig had some MAJOR issues while shipping…it appeared we made an enemy at the UPS store. The electrical wiring was ripped out, our drums filled with lunar dust simulant had ripped off and one of the connections from the motor to the drum was pretty much destroyed…ohhh and a $380 valve is no longer in working order…its not like we needed it or anything. So I guess you could say things got off to a bumpy start…and things may or may not have been said about the UPS store that might not be suitable for children to hear. After things we starting to get back together and look nice again Sam and I said its probably best that we weren’t there during the unveiling of the rig…seeing as how we are the two who flip out the most about even the small things…the rest of the team said they had thought the same thing while unpacking everything.

Just when we got things fixed and started to feel good about ourselves the alarms started to go off...there was a thunderstorm. When there’s lightning the hangar goes into lockdown. The doors are closed and you can’t leave until all is clear. At this point, we had skipped lunch because we needed to get our stuff working and we were all pretty famished. We were not allowed to leave until 5:00…but who doesn’t love a good thunderstorm.

At 6:00 we went to dinner with all the people in the reduced gravity program. It was a lot of fun...I mean…we were real excited to finally eat! Another team joined us at our table which was nice to meet other nerds like us…well…Engineering majors…but close enough. This team’s faculty advisor talked to all of us and was really nice…I didn’t get to talk to her too much because I was farthest away from her but she seemed pretty awesome…but I had no idea how awesome this woman actually was. After the other team left, Isa turned to me and said, that lady is an Astronaut! SHE WAS JUST IN SPACE!! HOW COOL IS THAT! This woman was the alternate flyers for Christa McAuliffe he space shuttle Challenger. If she was on that mission none of us would have been able to say we had dinner with an Astronaut. Apparently, she was just on a mission and returned in the fall.
Overall it was a pretty good day. Despite our unnecessary setbacks caused by UPS it looks like everything is all good! We have already gotten 3 green check marks, pretty sure Yale only had 1 the last time I checked…just saying.

~ Erin