My Journey to NASA Wallops - Part 1: Excitement and Frustration

On December 4th of 2013, I received the most exciting e-mail that has yet to grace my inbox. It was from NASA Social, a small crew that coordinates the social media efforts of NASA as a whole and organizes special events. The e-mail was to inform me that my application had been accepted for media credentials to attend their next event: the launch of the Orbital Sciences Antares rocket with Cygnus resupply ship, departing from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, destined for the International Space Station. After a lifetime of obsession with spaceflight I was finally going to see a full-scale launch in person! As a bonus, it turned out that the launch date was December 17th, exactly 110 years to the day that the Wright Brothers first flew.

I confirmed my intention to attend, I booked a hotel room, I took off from work. All that was left was the awful wait. Knowing that I was attending made the next few days crawl like molasses and the two weeks until launch say seemed a torturous wait.

December 9th - I got an e-mail stating that the launch had slipped back a day, to the 18th. Not a big deal. It's spaceflight and these things happen. The hotel happily changed my reservation and my work was kind enough to change my days off. The schedule of events arrived not long after and this particular rocket nerd was overjoyed seeing the specifics of what was in store for me.

I was so glad we got that delay out of the way early. The Antares is a reasonably simple rocket and they'd reported that they were working no issues and there was a 95% chance of favorable weather. "Let's do this!" I thought.

December 11th - The International Space Station experienced a major malfunction of the ammonia Cooling Loop A, causing heating issues onboard. The crew was fine but a number of systems aboard ISS had been shut down to preserve power for sensitive experiments. If the issue wasn't resolved soon it would have an impact on launch date because there is an added level of risk anytime two spacecraft dock together but to do so with one spacecraft (the station) in a deficient state would be unnecessarily dangerous.

December 14th - Planners/controllers at NASA decided to delay the launch until December 19th while the ISS ground controllers attempted to regulate the temperature control system through a software modification. So far the software changes had limited success and they were attempting to find a "sweet spot" that would allow the Antares to fly up and dock with the ISS on time, then astronauts could conduct spacewalks to replace the malfunctioning flow valve. NASA was going ahead and loading time-sensitive cargo into Cygnus in case it all worked out. I called the hotel to push my reservation back another day. The woman on the phone asks why I needed to change and when I tell her about the launch delay she say, "Oh, we're going to get a LOT of that today!"

December 17th - With no word advising otherwise, I began to pack a bag to depart the next morning for my two days down in Virginia. While checking to see what my fellow Social attendees were saying via Facebook and Twitter I stumbled across the NASA announcement that they would indeed be delaying the Antares launch until some time in January. My mind has a tendency, which I sometimes like and sometimes dislike, to easily notice connections between events, such as the fact that this flight was delayed until "some time" on the day that I originally thought I would see that rocket climb to space while hearing and feeling the roar of those AJ-26 rocket engines... Stupid brain. Why would you go and point out something like that when you know I'm already annoyed?

December 20th - It was announced that the launch had been reschedule for NET (No Earlier Than) January 7th, 2014. Again, the requisite plans were assembled. Took a couple more days off from work and booked a hotel room again. One cool aspect of all this was that the woman at the hotel gave me the room for the same rate that I had in December "because you're with the NASA group." It is pretty awesome to have somebody say you got something because you're "with" NASA!

In the coming days we learned that the software patch for the ISS ammonia flow control valve wasn't working and after a series of very successful spacewalks the malfunctioning components were swapped out for functional ones. With this, the problem was resolved and the station was once again ready to receive a visitor, in the form of a Cygnus resupply spacecraft.

And then we all got to learn an evil new phrase:  

"Polar Vortex"

I don't know the technical details behind it (I'm more interested in things that fly through the atmosphere than the actual atmosphere itself) but I've come to believe that it's when that guy Snow Miser from "The Year Without A Santa" beats his brother Heat Miser in a boxing match and everywhere gets to measure local temperature with single digits. Both Fahrenheit and Celsius.

On January 3rd, the launch was delayed another day, until January 8th, because the air temperature dropped below the operating temperature of some of Antares' components.

What did I do to deserve such torment from the universe?!

Thankfully, no further delays occurred and in the early hours of January 7th I left home on an exciting journey to see things in person that I had heretofore only seen in pictures or read about.

To be continued in My Journey to Wallops - Part 2: My Dream Day